Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

windowslatest.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 402 posts

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#221

Post by Gud »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #198
72deluxe wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am baffled by this. I wrote a cross-platform GUI for an audio signal processor in wxWidgets that rendered all of its own widgets (own Draw calls, for faders, graphic EQ, compressors, drag/drop linking of nodes for a layout, knobs, meters/scopes) and incorporated Horde3D as a 3D rendering of the arena. It ran on macOS and Windows. Another chap handled the network control code that included joining multicast groups t…

If they want fungible engineers, yes. They don’t want to pay extra for an expert in wxWidgets and Horde3D. They don’t want to wait while that expert’s replacement comes up to speed on Horde3D. They don’t even want to wait for any existing engineers to learn these two technologies. They know web, they can manage web - web is “less risky.”

You don’t need to be an expert in wxWidgets to send some text messages…

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#222

Post by tcfhgj »

mdasen wrote: post #194
RossBencina wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade, and even Microsoft barely uses them. What are you talking about? The Windows APIs have been stable for at least 20 years.

I think few people are using the Win32 APIs directly and Microsoft has been shifting their stuff a bunch. WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation ) had been the recommendation a while back, but then Microsoft started pushing UWP (Universal Windows Platform). Both of those have been succeeded by WinUI 3. UWP has been deprecated. WPF is alive, but more in a maintenance mode while WinUI 3 takes over the future. Oh, and Win…

afaik UWP still works though, and switching to WinUI3 is mostly just updating the namespace of your windows components

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#223

Post by cm2187 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #205
cm2187 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the same bugs. It looks like after ICQ, writing a chat app has become an impossible computer science problem (skype, teams, whatsapp,…). How did that ancient civilisation from the 90s managed to build a functional chat app? The know how is lost to times.

> How did that ancient civilisation from the 90s managed to build a functional chat app? By only accepting ANSI input, not encrypting any messages, and not bothering to protect users' from remote attacks. Facebooks's GUI stack for WhatsApp may be rather buggy but on a technical level there's a lot more going on than back in the days of unencrypted TCP connections over plaintext protocols. Meanwhile, Telegram has an e…

SSL and basic encryption isn’t exactly rocket science today. I have not used the telegram desktop app but their web app is completely broken.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#224

Post by valleyer »

brap wrote: post #97
tcfhgj wrote: post #89

If companies needed to pay ressource usage of their apps, the digital world would look nothing like today

When I buy a refrigerator, if a model has insane power consumption that makes me think about my electric bill, I’d be less inclined to buy it. The refrigerator manufacturer is going to sell less. So in a way, you can say that they’re definitely paying for those wasted resources. For software companies it’s the same, in a way. They pay whatever the consumers deem appropriate. It’s just that consumers don’t really care…

Power consumption of newly sold refrigerators is regulated by the U.S. government (and, I assume, other big countries), so I don't think this argument works in your favor.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#227

Post by vultour »

brap wrote: post #97
tcfhgj wrote: post #89

If companies needed to pay ressource usage of their apps, the digital world would look nothing like today

When I buy a refrigerator, if a model has insane power consumption that makes me think about my electric bill, I’d be less inclined to buy it. The refrigerator manufacturer is going to sell less. So in a way, you can say that they’re definitely paying for those wasted resources. For software companies it’s the same, in a way. They pay whatever the consumers deem appropriate. It’s just that consumers don’t really care…

First of all, RAM is not cheap. Second, the average consumer is not able to install more RAM even if it was. Consumer hardware often has barely enough RAM to run Windows.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#228

Post by redbell »

I feel this trend is going to stick for the upcoming years! It's not just Meta, every big player there is adopting this mentality.

Take Microsoft for instance, they have been pushing heavily what they called the New Outlook, which is basically a web-based client mirroring Outlook on the web (OWA) , packed into an EXE file (not sure if it is Electronized or not)! Then, they renamed the real native Outlook app as Classic Outlook to feel old-fashioned and outdated and as result, we ended up losing some core features that made Outlook, Outlook. We lose: COM Add-ins and VBA Macros, MAPI Support, Word as Email Editor, .PST File Support.. to name a few..

This would be probably one of the reasons contributing to the Collapse of Civilization (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317)

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#229

Post by savolai »

72deluxe wrote: post #190
iamcalledrob wrote: post #126

As the person who designed and fought for this app, I am a bit sad about the change. The native app was by no means perfect, but it felt like a real productivity tool that was trying to be respectful of it's environment. I've come to the conclusion that native desktop apps are just not viable from large companies, even if there is headcount. The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and exp…

I am baffled by this. I wrote a cross-platform GUI for an audio signal processor in wxWidgets that rendered all of its own widgets (own Draw calls, for faders, graphic EQ, compressors, drag/drop linking of nodes for a layout, knobs, meters/scopes) and incorporated Horde3D as a 3D rendering of the arena. It ran on macOS and Windows. Another chap handled the network control code that included joining multicast groups t…

If you can deploy your wxwidgets app as a networked app in the browser too, then sure.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#230

Post by outime »

It's always the same discussions here whenever a company decides to use Electron or a similar solution. It's beyond tiring to see the same arguments being repeated.

A company's goal is to make money by optimizing its resources. What benefits would Meta gain by maintaining native apps for WhatsApp across the three major operating systems? I can tell you: absolutely none, only negatives. Nobody except a negligible fraction of users would care about native performance or idle memory consumption. No one is going to switch to Signal or whatever the flavor-of-the-year messaging app is because of this.

It would be a different story if WhatsApp were to lose a significant portion of its user base due to the app becoming unusable or extremely slow. But for the vast majority, this change will go unnoticed or frankly won't matter at all. So, expect most companies to continue adopting Electron-like apps (for the few that still have native apps anyway) for exactly the same reasons.

Sorry to be blunt, but it's really tiresome to see these discussions going around in circles here. It’s pointless to keep debating this, it's not going to change. If one day a framework emerges that's comparable to Electron (or something similar) but requires fewer resources to develop against, I could see Meta and other companies considering it... provided the migration costs aren’t too high. But again, no end-user truly cares about this.

Post reply on HN