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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

#341

Post by qcnguy »

jack_tripper wrote: post #249
tsimionescu wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the old APIs keep working, Microsoft does like to come up with completely new APIs every five years or so. If you want to do basic UI on Windows today, you can use: - Win32 UI - MFC - .NET WinForms - WinFX - .NET WPF - WinRT - UWP And I'm sure there are many others that I'm forgetting.

Adding new APIs does not hinder your ability to use the old APIs you're familiar with. I think apps like Notepad++ and Sumatra PDF are still written in Win32.

You can't get a competitive UX by using Win32, even basics like resizable windows and proper hidpi support is missing. And the number of people who know this API is probably sub-1% these days. There are dozens of us left, dozens!

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#342

Post by qcnguy »

mostlyk wrote: post #334
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…

Why kill people who are trying to reverse engineer and write native apps for this? WhatsApp just bans you :(

They can't easily tell the difference between "good" custom clients and spambots.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#343

Post by DonHopkins »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #272
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…

Bubbles are antipattern that only adds more padding to already excessive padding.

Bubbles can be extremely distracting, but users love them.

https://youtu.be/h2KDdNY8Cuc?t=21

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#344

Post by qcnguy »

hliyan wrote: post #132
zahllos wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could call it Flash. Or Java Applets.

You have completely misunderstood the proposal. None of those drive OS native UI widgets through markup and scripts downloaded from the web.

Java applets drove native widgets in their first iteration. It wasn't markup but that hardly matters, you could have easily slapped some XML over AWT and the difference between a .jar and a .js isn't big.

They had to stop because native widgets aren't secure enough.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#345

Post by sheepscreek »

savolai wrote: post #229
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 you can deploy your wxwidgets app as a networked app in the browser too, then sure.

Ironically, you can actually do this with wasm.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#346

Post by qcnguy »

cm2187 wrote: post #166
pta2002 wrote: post #59

I do want to point out, as someone who uses the WhatsApp app (to me, it’s slightly more convenient than the web version) that the old native windows app was /awful/. It looked native enough, but it just didn’t work. For as long as I remember it would randomly stop accepting input into the text field and I’d have to restart the app, and this was insanely frequent. Typing dead keys was also randomly broken with accents…

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.

Modern chat apps work better and have more functionality. The knowhow is specifically for Windows chat apps. And the reason the knowledge was lost is that Microsoft sucked at platform design so people stopped learning their platforms and the people who still have the knowledge don't want to go down the career dead end of writing apps for them.

This is partly because MS became insanely complacent. The Windows team is very junior. Just ask anyone who has worked with them. They don't have the skills or resourcing that they did in the 90s.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#347

Post by qcnguy »

eviks wrote: post #16

> WhatsApp is one of those Windows apps that went from being a web wrapper to a native app and then back to the web again after all these years of investment. We often hear stories about the speed of development and the issues of maintaining native apps, and then there are these rewrites every few years. Don't they waste more resources vs. creating / fixing the gaps in the native app? And this isn't somes quick start…

You're assuming the bugs/gaps can be fixed. The native frameworks on Windows suck so hard even Microsoft don't use them. If you build on them you're going to encounter lots of bugs and missing features that you can't easily work around, nor fix (they aren't open source), and which Chrome doesn't suffer from.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#348

Post by EasyMark »

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…

Oh it's viable, they're just too cheap to do it. The bean counters will always win in the end, and they are relentless; it trumps quality, aesthetics, and everything else given enough time.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#349

Post by qcnguy »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #157

Out of curiosity, Does anyone know where exactly does the bloat of the electron come from in terms of ram usage, compared to a "native toolkit"? Because just parsing html/xml/some declarative ui description to create a scenegraph and pushing it to the GPU is something I'm sure even native frameworks like Qt do. Yet I can feel the latency in vs code vs. say sublime text. It's tempting to blame the huge js blobs trying…

A lot of it is sandboxing and the multiprocess architecture that requires. There's lots of IPC. Custom Chrome builds can disable the IPC and run everything in one process, but Electron doesn't because they try to minimize the number of patches they apply so it's easier to keep up with Chrome code churn.

Re: Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

#350

Post by trillic »

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…

not nearly enough vibes for the current gen of grads
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