421–430 of 515 posts
I think about this a lot, and the conclusion I've come to is that the market (simply meaning the popularity) rewards features and intuitive UI above everything else. I think we've been on this trajectory for some time: getting users with less and less actual computer literacy to do more and more with computers.
Making software efficiently is more valuable than making more efficient software. Making software inefficiently takes a lot of time and people's time is expensive. A good example of an expensive use of time is optimizing something that doesn't really need optimizing. I know a lot of people go OCD on this stuff and I've been there and done that myself. But it mostly does not matter a lot in terms of value of the softw…
the decision to shift towards web apps and electron apps is mostly because of the cheapness of the development, and binding to service-oriented architecture thus monthly payment... in other words: money
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>no top-level logic will just justify free here Not true. The technical term for "ultimately need money" is discounted future cash flow. It is impossible to know for sure what price you have to charge for any particular item at any given time in order to optimise for this metric. Realistically, the answer depends on the state of competition between platforms. We all know what that state is.
> It is impossible to know so it is true, you can't provide any top-level logic to justify 0, you need some facts
As this is such a pointlessly contrived interpretation of the term "logic" in this context, I chose to use a different one: Is there a set of empirical circumstances under which an optimisation algorithm could conclude that the optimal price is zero? The answer to that is clearly yes.
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It's going to be a mix of: 1. JS doesn't support multithreading, nor many other features that are useful for performance (e.g. mmap). This severely limits what you can do and makes it hard to scale up by parallelizing. 2. JS is a very pointer heavy language that was never designed for performance, so the CPU finds it harder to execute than old-school C++ of the type you'd find in Word. It's hard to design tight data…
Or it's just using the wrong tool for the job. With Google's resources, they could build a UI framework that runs on top of OpenGL and have people download an app built with it instead. Next, we'd have people building interfaces on top of latex.
Also, Docs uses a custom UI framework already. It implements all the UI controls itself, the browser is only really used for rendering text and styled boxes. I remember the first version of Docs when it was called Writely used the browser's built in editing support but they had to abandon it because it was too buggy, so they moved to using JS to lay out every character and draw their own cursor. It was considered wild and crazy at the time but Chrome was getting fast enough to make it work. Of course, it's more efficient to have editing be implemented fully in C++ but browser makers never managed to make that work properly, so, slow path it is.
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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.
And if you don't sign your binaries on Windows, Windows Defender will assume they're malware and silently delete them.
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.
To be blunt, you do not have to create a developer account, sign binaries, or share 30% of your revenue with Microsoft. MS's API are not a mess in my opinion. You do have several options (traditional Win32, .NET, UWP, etc.). These options all work fairly well and are very flexible. As for, Apple, I do not know but I suspect you can make Mac applications without a developer account. You need a developer account for iP…
It is a lot of money when you consider it should be free and serves exactly no purpose.
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In several countries you can't file your taxes or access your bank without a google/apple smartphone. People need to live too.
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The alternative that exists today that I can buy and all the apps I need for work will actually exist and function correctly is called…
> all the apps I need for work The whole thing is like an intentional vicious circle. People buy the systems because certain applications are available on them (or rather because that's what everyone does), and the application manufacturers support the systems where the most customers are expected. But if one takes an impartial look at which applications or functions are really needed for a company, there are certain…
My statement was: Apparently, people prefer to buy expensive devices that eavesdrop and patronize them. As long as this continues and people don't run away from these manufacturers, they will continue with the trend and patronize people even more.
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.
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.