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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?

#41

Post by glass-z13 »

greenthrow wrote: post #30
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.

"Barely any reason"... except they created and maintain the entire plarform and tooling that you're building on. And in Apple's case they give it away for free with any mac. I'm old enough to remember when buying development tooling for DOS or Windows was $$$$$$

Can i borrow your compiler for a few days?

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

#42

Post by silverquiet »

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.

I work at a place that ships an app to both Apple and Microsoft Desktops (we could even do Linux is there was ever any demand for it). We use this old thing called Java which still seems to work. I don't develop it though so I guess I don't have to worry about too much of my resume getting caught up with unfashionable languages (let's face the facts about what most tech these days is trying to advance - promotions - not the state of the art).

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

#44

Post by mattl »

cma wrote: post #38
greenthrow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Barely any reason"... except they created and maintain the entire plarform and tooling that you're building on. And in Apple's case they give it away for free with any mac. I'm old enough to remember when buying development tooling for DOS or Windows was $$$$$$

They had a $100 yearly dev fee for ios.

Only if you want to distribute via the App Store. There’s also TestFlight and distribution of source code I believe if you want to avoid that.

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

#45

Post by zer00eyz »

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 a refund? Most of the time you loose money (processing fees etc)

If your under a million bucks a year apple is 15%. If you're building a low price app or a value add app, odds are that apple is going to be a far better deal for you than doing it on your own.

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

#46

Post by brabel »

fireflash38 wrote: post #11

Where in that stack is the biggest loss of performance? DOM? Javascript? Browser? Or is it because everything needs to sync to the cloud as you edit it?

I think it's just the way web apps are architectured. If you use vanilla JS you can make the browser render stuff really fast even if you change the DOM, as long as you do it efficiently (don't update ALL the DOM on every change!). But I bet Google uses some reactive framework that keeps a bloody copy of the whole DOM in memory, so when you throw 30MB of content into the DOM, that copy that was meant to make things faster starts being the bottleneck.

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

#47

Post by EGreg »

mattl wrote: post #40
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.

You don’t have to do any of that for a native Mac app. Signing it is a good idea but not required and you can distribute it from your own website or even from GitHub/Lab where you can tell people it’s not notarized and they’ll need to command click and open it the first time.

The reason that Apple and Microsoft require all this is also that native apps have a lot more access to the system.

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

#48

Post by AdrianB1 »

We can write efficient software, but many times we decide not to.

1. Why bother optimizing when the developer's time is more expensive than RAM and CPU power? I see this a lot.

2. From the times that I can remember (mid '80) till now, only top developers write efficiently software that is efficient. Most developers are average (this is not bad, it is just an observation) and for the average developer software optimization is too expensive in terms of time invested. Some don't know how to do it, some are not proficient enough to do it in the constraints of the projects given to them by bean-counting managers. "good enough" quality is software management is much safer than "good enough" Boeing planes, so when Boeing is cutting corners then managers of developers cut even more.

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

#49

Post by mattl »

a2128 wrote: post #14

I may be way off-base here but this is what I imagine the problem is: 1. Company executive decides their developers need top-of-the-line hardware to remain competitive in today's market 2. Developers make web apps on their company-provided M5 Ultra Pro Max 128GB RAM powerhouse laptop 3. They never test it on their father's old 2010 family PC, or at least they don't test often/thoroughly enough to realize many parts a…

So this is part of my current job: testing things on older hardware or less powerful hardware plus older but still used browsers, especially on mobile.

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

#50

Post by silverquiet »

passion__desire wrote: post #36
a2128 wrote: post #14

I may be way off-base here but this is what I imagine the problem is: 1. Company executive decides their developers need top-of-the-line hardware to remain competitive in today's market 2. Developers make web apps on their company-provided M5 Ultra Pro Max 128GB RAM powerhouse laptop 3. They never test it on their father's old 2010 family PC, or at least they don't test often/thoroughly enough to realize many parts a…

Related point, do google android engineers dogfood android phones to themselves? I guess most of them would be Apple users.

Android encompasses $80 burner phones to what... like $2K flagships? It's a big target.
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