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Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

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Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#231

Post by bossyTeacher »

baq wrote: post #195
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…

nobody they hire knows how to do anything that isn't react anymore.

They said software will eat the world. They were sort of right. React will eat the world.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#232

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> So you're saying that it is impossible for a large company to somehow use native toolkits to draw text bubbles and emojis??

One weird thing about software development is that there are plenty of things which motivated individual developers can achieve which large companies can't even write the requirements for, let alone achieve.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#233

Post by andsoitis »

fhennig wrote: post #202
baq wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you kinda answered yourself and perhaps suggested the answer, but it's worth saying out loud: they don't want whatsapp to be a chat app. they want it to be the next facebook and they want to smuggle it in a chat app container. if it seems like if it starts working out, I'll be buying Meta stock with disgust.

Why buy stock of something you don't like? Surely you can find other profitable investment options that also then don't support the thing you don't like?

Buying shares in a company supports the company financially only in very limited contexts (e.g. IPO). Buying shares primarily benefits you as an investor.

Buying shares in a company doesn’t benefit its operations, like making a product, directly. Hence, buying shares != support company’s products, however counterintuitive that feels.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#234

Post by pjc50 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #188
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right that the issue is the coordination cost. It's not about the number of resources but just the fact that you need those resources to coordinate, slowing everything down. Not a problem in waterfall, since you can set the targets beforehand and just have the teams work in parallel. In an "Agile" setting though (not the manifesto version, the current practice version)? It's a huge mess. So then the…

> Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade What a wrong and misleading statement. Not they aren't. Otherwise Winamp 2.95 from 2003 wouldn't flawlessly work on my Windows 11 install 23 years later. Same with my Unreal Tournament 99 installation that I just copied over via a CD left from my Windows 98 PC. As long as you haven't used any undocumented APIs or made your app hac…

They're half-right. Microsoft do keep supporting the OS APIs, but it's the UI frameworks that get half-assed and abandoned. Which is why so many people recommend Avalonia these days. Microsoft don't even reliably use their own frameworks - go through Win11 and see how many Windows Forms dialogs are still present in things like settings and Explorer.

(WinUI is also a hybrid: since it uses the DirectX APIs rather than the old GDI model, most of it is in a userspace package that's delivered as an .appx)

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#235

Post by jeroenhd »

cm2187 wrote: post #223
jeroenhd wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Secure, end-to-end, multi-device encryption isn't easy. Plenty of people try and fail to build secure messengers based on top of PGP and Signal's protocol.

I don't use the Telegram web app, but their native apps work excellently. The insertion of ads has been a major disappointment but the chat UX itself is still great, even on native Linux.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#236

Post by sunaookami »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #197
sunaookami wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. The "recommended" section of the start menu is written with React Native but compiled to native XAML and not running web technologies. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125217

Is that's why on a system where I removed widgets and web search results windows keeps msedgewebview2 active?

I don't think that the activation of this process is tied to the enabled-state of any features and the recommended section/start menu in general does not even use a Webview. It may be active all the time because various parts of the OS use it (I think the settings app for MS account stuff and the Explorer for some Office 365 features?) and it's faster keeping it active instead of starting it constantly.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#237

Post by pjc50 »

habibur wrote: post #191
ahoka wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone remembers Active Desktop?

Windows still has Active Desktop, doesn't it?

I believe that went out with Internet Explorer. You certainly can't set your desktop to a web page any more.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#238

Post by sirwhinesalot »

jack_tripper wrote: post #188
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right that the issue is the coordination cost. It's not about the number of resources but just the fact that you need those resources to coordinate, slowing everything down. Not a problem in waterfall, since you can set the targets beforehand and just have the teams work in parallel. In an "Agile" setting though (not the manifesto version, the current practice version)? It's a huge mess. So then the…

> Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade What a wrong and misleading statement. Not they aren't. Otherwise Winamp 2.95 from 2003 wouldn't flawlessly work on my Windows 11 install 23 years later. Same with my Unreal Tournament 99 installation that I just copied over via a CD left from my Windows 98 PC. As long as you haven't used any undocumented APIs or made your app hac…

It's not wrong nor misleading at all. Win32 doesn't even support dark mode properly because it's effectively "deprecated" like all the others in the graveyard.

Who cares if they keep working if the only way to get dark mode is to custom render the whole UI yourself? Might as well do something non-native at that point.

Microsoft does not provide a serious UI library for applications to use. It provides 10 half broken and deprecated ones.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#239

Post by rwmj »

tcfhgj wrote: post #216
rwmj wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can report that Matrix/Element is still absolutely terrible, and not just the search.

not perfect? yes terrible? no way

Every time I use it, it has some huge box over a third of the page saying I must "verify sessions".

It's incredibly slow to propagate messages.

Initial set up is very confusing and offers far too many choices.

I've never worked out how to find rooms. Regularly someone will give me a room name and I can't find it or join it.

Their entire service went down (did someone say "decentralised"?) a few months ago.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#240

Post by vintagedave »

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…

> The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and experiments here, there and everywhere, then the coordination complexity increases nonlinearly with the number of platforms.

Why not use a common library, where platform teams can update what features they use from it at their own pace?

Or why not use some other tech that allows multi-platform native shipping? The company I just started at, RemObjects, builds software for Mac and Windows (and iOS etc) from a common codebase. They just keep the UI separate, and all that is done when there's a new feature is _only_ UI layer coordination.

So an app has a C# (say) or Go codebase, and a UI layer in WPF and Cocoa.

I feel like coordination cost goes way down with both of these:

a) Library approach: central functionality, platform teams not tied to specifics

b) Shared codebase where all logic lives: platform teams do only UI

Edit: forgot to add, all this is can be across languages, ie maybe you have a Go shared library and write your Cocoa UI layer in C#, that's fine, their tech makes it all interop.

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