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Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

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Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#261

Post by dhosek »

varispeed wrote: post #232
cosmotic wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: you now get a lot of tooling for 'free', which used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

One off few hundred or few thousands is nothing in comparison to 30% tax. That said, I don't know about Mac, but you can build apps using free tools - maybe in not as convenient way, but certainly you can. I remember, because I was someone who couldn't afford Visual Studio licence and had to make do with GNU tools. The greed of these companies put me off from developing anything.

In the early 90s, you could expect to pay anywhere from $200–1000 for a good C/C++ compiler. Now it’s free. The 30% tax, as many people have already pointed out, is only if you want to sell through the store. Back in the 90s, if you were selling software, downloading off the net wasn’t really a thing yet and you could easily expect to end up giving up 40–60% of the retail sales price and out of what was left you were paying for manufacturing of product so you’d maybe get 20–40% of the retail sales price.

Which leaves the certificate thing and while it’s an annoyance, it’s also nice as a software user to know that a program I’m running is the program it claims to be without much friction on my part, and the cost can’t be that prohibitive since I don’t remember the last time I ended up with an unsigned binary on my Mac, even for free software like TeX and friends or Aquamacs.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#263

Post by palijer »

zer00eyz wrote: post #45
s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

Ok Set up CC processing on the web: How much are you going to pay stripe? 2.9% + 30¢ ... that means you have to charge 10 bucks to get down to a 6% transaction fee. Quite the price floor and an interesting cap on your pricing model! What does managing chargebacks cost you? The moment your taking money your going to hire in customer service, or spend time dealing with CS. What happens when you get a chargeback, or do…

Dealing with Apple is a tax as well though.

How do you calculate a price for not being able to release your main product? Usually without clear indications of what exact interpretation of a rule you are breaking...

We've had delays of a week because of things like we mentioned "Android" in an integration setting that had been there for years.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#264

Post by sydbarrett74 »

mr_toad wrote: post #242
fragmede wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't sign your binaries on macOS, the friction for the user to run your app is prohibitive, outside of developer-focused communities.

It didn’t take my kids long to learn how to run unsigned binaries, and neither of them are developers.

Yes, but your kids have a technical parent, so chances are they both have significantly above-average intelligence.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#265

Post by xboxnolifes »

anonymoushn wrote: post #187
tomsmeding wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not discounting your lament about memory use, this caught my eye: > I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster! Sure, Windows has grown a lot in size (as have other OSes). But startup is typically bounded by disk random access, not compute power or memory (granted, I don't use Windows, if 8GB is not enough to boot the OS then things are much worse…

I think Windows taking 1 minute on SSDs is typical, and it takes like 40 if you want to use a spinning magnet

Most of my windows PC's boot time happens before my computer even starts loading the OS. If I enabled fast boot in my bios, I'm pretty sure my PC would boot in around 15 seconds.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#266

Post by _aavaa_ »

cosmotic wrote: post #206
s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

Devil's advocate: you now get a lot of tooling for 'free', which used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Counter offer: the tooling is ultimately for their benefit. They need the apps to make their platform what it is.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#267

Post by sydbarrett74 »

alerighi wrote: post #64
stephc_int13 wrote: post #20

My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps. Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse. The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still ful…

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is…

Blame surveillance capitalism for a lot of this. All those hundreds (thousands?) of trackers running simultaneously add up.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#268

Post by sydbarrett74 »

flenserboy wrote: post #213
alerighi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is…

Think also about all the finished stand-alone applications which have been discarded because of replacement APIs, or because they were written in assembly. We had near-perfect (limited feature-wise from a 3-decade view, of course) word processors, spreadsheets, and single-user databases in the late 80s/early 90s which were, except for many specific use-case additions, complete & only in need of regular maintenance &…

Your sentiment is probably shared by many dusting off old systems and going back to first principles. SerenityOS is one example.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#269

Post by xet7 »

a1o wrote: post #37
rini17 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use Qt?

You will still be in binary sign hell and Windows Defender may wake up one day and decide your app is a virus "when it does X", which is exactly it's business case. Complaining to MS will do nothing since their online thing will check and not find anything. Boom, entire software business gone for reason out of control. Doesn't care about your signed certificate too.

That's why the only way to develop software is to provide URL for login. MS desktops are usually too locked down to install anything.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#270

Post by xvilka »

s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

Apple certificates are cheap compared to Microsoft. To get rid of UAC on Windows you have to buy certificate for thousands of dollars.
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