351–360 of 402 posts
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But Telegram end-to-end encryption is optional as far as I know.
It is, and it's a good reason to avoid the platform, but they do support E2EE _and_ have a good, native desktop application.
Indeed. I'm not actively using Telegram, but I tried the desktop application (made with Qt if I remember well), and it's way ahead of what Whatsapp offers. Not to mention it's fast and relatively light.
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Yes. Arguably because of the organisational cost of maintaining both a web version (which they arguably need) and a native windows version (which they arguably don’t need).
Most of WhatsApp is UI veneer on a set of webservices. Unless they’ve architected their app badly, I’m not seeing the cost of maintaining a native software being substantial.
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 have clients who regularly send me photos/videos to publish on websites. There are many usability issues around this:
1. There is no option to "download all", which means you need to click through every photo manually and hit the download icon.
2. When navigating through photos, the download icon is often hidden behind a submenu which means it takes two clicks to download a photo instead of one.
3. It's impossible to download videos without first having fully buffered them. This means you need to click through the full video to ensure it's streamed to your device before the download icon appears. This is super annoying especially with longer videos.
4. Bonus non-web annoyance: if a user sends you multiple photos, your phone goes insane with notifications and sounds like a rapid-fire pinball machine. DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING
As a web developer I find it incredibly difficult to even think of releasing software with these kinds of basic inadequacies.
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 Clas…
Speaking of new outlook, has anyone else had search just...not work? I'll search for emails sent from myself, to myself (of which I know there are hundreds) and get 7 results. Same in the web app, but outlook classic works fine. Mind boggling
Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently that was just too hard to update for a multibillion AI-powered behemoth. So, a wrapper it is! You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you c…
I keep fighting with devs that want to use web-everything. Luckily for me, i have the ultimate power so i can just say "Firefox doesn't support that. I don't use chrome. period." But lately i had to start saying Safari doesn't support that so we would lose all iphones, or we can start investigate after we have a working solution. God damn react.
The advantage of the web app is that it just works, without installation, so there's no friction there. I'd very much prefer a native app, but the overhead is quite high, no?
- slim down to a more efficient, non-virtual-DOM web stack (e. g hypermedia)
- move to a wrapper around native webview (Tauri)
- use one of the excellent cross-platform frameworks (Flutter, or that new one just open sourced by Snap)
For WhatsApp specifically, I don't understand why a company with the size and resources of Meta can't support native versions for Windows, Mac _and_ Linux. I think many people would accept non-feature-parity with the web/mobile versions, in exchange for a tight, reliable desktop messaging app...
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I can report that Matrix/Element is still absolutely terrible, and not just the search.
Have you tried WhatsApp? There are weird non moderated groups of children, organised crime and much more. It's a fucking weird and dangerous place to be around IMO.
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> It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency. I don’t think we have. This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption. The phenomenon was described already in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox JS and the web has seen performance improvements. They lead to more ads being served and more code being released faster to users.
A reasonable comment, unfairly downvoted. That said, I do firmly agree with the parent: there is choice involved here, engineering decisions. The Microsoft world is particularly bloated, as they insist on shoehorning in unwanted anti-features into their OS. Much more efficient operating systems (and ways of building a chat client) exist. Jevon's paradox may describe a general tendency, but it's no excuse for awful so…
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…
That's not really native either. Whether it's a web wrapper or Electron or wxWidgets, just because something runs "natively" doesn't mean it feels native.
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> It's amazing how far we've regressed in efficency. I don’t think we have. This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption. The phenomenon was described already in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox JS and the web has seen performance improvements. They lead to more ads being served and more code being released faster to users.
> This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption. The phenomenon was described already in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Completely wrong an irrelevant analogy! I see where you went sideways, you confused trigger with consequence completely. Here the efficiency for the very same application got very, very very, increadibly hugely, galactically worse. Not better. The prem…
The application is ”business logic”.
The engine is JS. The more efficient JS engines get the more compute and memory JS will use to deliver business logic in the universe.