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I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

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Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#51

Post by Dalewyn »

blitzar wrote: post #47
Dalewyn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually find myself actively avoiding getting anything from application stores without prior outside knowledge. Why? Because given no other context I cannot tell apart the decent from the bullshit, let alone the good. There are no differentiators because the storefront obviously accepts everything including the bull-est of shits, being paid-for or free-beer is hardly a useful measure these days (and $5 is nothing)…

> I could/can count on word-of-mouth websites with EXE and ZIP downloads If you did this - your computer was 100% compromised.

In theory? Sure. In practice? No. It's been the latter enough times that I honestly think this theory is actually fearmongering.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#52

Post by ffsm8 »

coldtea wrote: post #45
ffsm8 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they were a dying breed, but no, you're not. You're just looking at the past with extremely rose tinted glasses. It's way,way easier to implement a UI like in the 90s with hmtl5. You're just trying to make a modern UI with all it's bells in whistles and now complain how complicated it is. The tech ain't any more complicated. The software you're imagining has a waaaay more complicated UI then what you did in th…

> You're just looking at the past with extremely rose tinted glasses Dude, some of us still write 90s style code, even Delphi style stuff (FreePascal and Lazarus), and can still compare it everyday to modern web dev. It was better without any "rose tinted glasses" needed. Same for 00s C#/.NET or even "classic" Visual Basic - dead easy to make even an elaborate UI going. > It's way,way easier to implement a UI like in…

You're putting words into my mouth I didn't say:

The "modern web stack" has an incredibly high ceiling wrt how complicated it can be.

It's floor isn't particularly complicated however, and definitely not higher then the equivalent software with the native APIs from the 90s.

You had buttons, inputs, text boxes. Pre-2k UI APIs were extremely limited. Did we even have hover in windows 95/98 or MacOS 9.0? The first time I've seen that was more towards 2010 then 2000 - windows XP/Vista and MacOSX, but it's been a long time since then

> No, it really is not. What you're describing is some simple form, as if 90s UIs were constrained to that.

Please provide an example then. I sure as hell can't think of one and googling didn't provide me with anything but that.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#53

Post by kaba0 »

lukan wrote: post #33
whartung wrote: post #25

Every time I take a stab at a web gui app, I’m daunted. The toolkits, the apparently billions of dependencies, the vastly complicated build processes. I tried again recently. HTML file and a separate JS file. Some SVG elements with a click handler. I had mouse in and mouse out logic, and that worked great. But for some reason the click handler did not. I tried it in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. It worked in Firefox.…

"Cross browser Hell. It’s supposed to be a sandbox only to find out the cat got there first." Hm, it is really not that bad anymore. Only if you target bleeding edge features, you will usually have issues. But a mouse click handler? I never managed to not have that working. Also I like vanilla JS. Web Apps can be really simple, if you avoid the bloat.

While I also don’t think that a mouse click handler would be problematic, my recent experience is that more complex apps are more and more often broken under firefox, but still work fine under chrome. E.g. miro boards are unusable under firefox, and it’s absolutely shameful of every company that can’t bother testing it on like 2 browsers.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#54

Post by kaba0 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #32
adastra22 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers like you and I are a dying breed. We remember writing applications for operating systems that had straightforward APIs, and OS developers that worked hard to ensure any app which used those APIs would not break. Most "full-stack" developers I know that write web apps have literally never written a line of C++ in their life, let alone written a rich text editor using an object oriented desktop GUI API. They…

I wish they were a dying breed, but no, you're not. You're just looking at the past with extremely rose tinted glasses. It's way,way easier to implement a UI like in the 90s with hmtl5. You're just trying to make a modern UI with all it's bells in whistles and now complain how complicated it is. The tech ain't any more complicated. The software you're imagining has a waaaay more complicated UI then what you did in th…

Well, the web (most common frameworks) doesn’t really have drag’n’drop UI editors. Writing complex widgets for the web had a long list of issues for a long time and only recently became feasible without hacks (they couldn’t be reasonably encapsulated from the rest of the website before shadow DOMs, and better js encapsulation).

As an example, there is no standard, no-one-gets-fired-for choosing complex table widget that can sort, filter, paginate, re-order, etc its rows/columns. Many of them fall just shy of a prod-ready implementation.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#55

Post by lukan »

kaba0 wrote: post #53
lukan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cross browser Hell. It’s supposed to be a sandbox only to find out the cat got there first." Hm, it is really not that bad anymore. Only if you target bleeding edge features, you will usually have issues. But a mouse click handler? I never managed to not have that working. Also I like vanilla JS. Web Apps can be really simple, if you avoid the bloat.

While I also don’t think that a mouse click handler would be problematic, my recent experience is that more complex apps are more and more often broken under firefox, but still work fine under chrome. E.g. miro boards are unusable under firefox, and it’s absolutely shameful of every company that can’t bother testing it on like 2 browsers.

"that can’t bother testing it on like 2 browsers"

Current browser market share: Chrome 64%, Safari 20%, Edge 5.3%, Samsung Internet 3.5%, Firefox: 2.2%

https://www.similarweb.com/browsers/

It is hard justifying extra effort for those 2.2% marketshare, unless you count in idealism. And most companies are there for profit.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#56

Post by ale42 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #52
coldtea wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're just looking at the past with extremely rose tinted glasses Dude, some of us still write 90s style code, even Delphi style stuff (FreePascal and Lazarus), and can still compare it everyday to modern web dev. It was better without any "rose tinted glasses" needed. Same for 00s C#/.NET or even "classic" Visual Basic - dead easy to make even an elaborate UI going. > It's way,way easier to implement a UI like in…

You're putting words into my mouth I didn't say: The "modern web stack" has an incredibly high ceiling wrt how complicated it can be. It's floor isn't particularly complicated however, and definitely not higher then the equivalent software with the native APIs from the 90s. You had buttons, inputs, text boxes. Pre-2k UI APIs were extremely limited. Did we even have hover in windows 95/98 or MacOS 9.0? The first time…

> Did we even have hover in windows 95/98? Hover how? Changing the appearance of a control when the mouse passes over it? Or having a tooltip appearing? Both can definitely be implemented quite easily. For the tooltip, I just checked on Delphi 2 (which I was using on Win95 ages ago) and it had the Hint and ShowHint properties (as the current VCL/LCL).

> Pre-2k UI APIs were extremely limited. But that was largely enough for most GUIs. Nowadays people are putting a full browser (Electron) to create an interface with a few buttons and a progress bar. I'm thinking of an actual application, a relatively famous SD card writing program which weighs something like 200 MB. Make it with native GUI controls and it takes 50 kB (maybe even less) and will not eat the RAM and CPU of the users.

Moreover, people are doing fancy GUIs, with the result that no two application look the same, totally confusing some users (Windows itself is a mess, since Windows 8).

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#57

Post by kaba0 »

lukan wrote: post #55
kaba0 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I also don’t think that a mouse click handler would be problematic, my recent experience is that more complex apps are more and more often broken under firefox, but still work fine under chrome. E.g. miro boards are unusable under firefox, and it’s absolutely shameful of every company that can’t bother testing it on like 2 browsers.

"that can’t bother testing it on like 2 browsers" Current browser market share: Chrome 64%, Safari 20%, Edge 5.3%, Samsung Internet 3.5%, Firefox: 2.2% https://www.similarweb.com/browsers/ It is hard justifying extra effort for those 2.2% marketshare, unless you count in idealism. And most companies are there for profit.

Edge and samsung internet are basically the same as chrome, so there are only 3 browsers to check. Especially that most stuff just works fine across the browsers, it’s not like cross-platform across OSs, it really is a bare minimum.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#58

Post by beretguy »

lukan wrote: post #55
kaba0 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I also don’t think that a mouse click handler would be problematic, my recent experience is that more complex apps are more and more often broken under firefox, but still work fine under chrome. E.g. miro boards are unusable under firefox, and it’s absolutely shameful of every company that can’t bother testing it on like 2 browsers.

"that can’t bother testing it on like 2 browsers" Current browser market share: Chrome 64%, Safari 20%, Edge 5.3%, Samsung Internet 3.5%, Firefox: 2.2% https://www.similarweb.com/browsers/ It is hard justifying extra effort for those 2.2% marketshare, unless you count in idealism. And most companies are there for profit.

There are only 3 browsers these days pretty much:

Chrome, Safari, Firefox.

It really shouldn’t be hard to test.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#59

Post by lukan »

beretguy wrote: post #58
lukan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"that can’t bother testing it on like 2 browsers" Current browser market share: Chrome 64%, Safari 20%, Edge 5.3%, Samsung Internet 3.5%, Firefox: 2.2% https://www.similarweb.com/browsers/ It is hard justifying extra effort for those 2.2% marketshare, unless you count in idealism. And most companies are there for profit.

There are only 3 browsers these days pretty much: Chrome, Safari, Firefox. It really shouldn’t be hard to test.

Have you ever tested something in mobile browsers?

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#60

Post by tarsinge »

dep_b wrote: post #50

The true death of desktop applications were system administrators and their draconian app policies. What do you want to do? Ask the eternally overworked BOFH of duty to go through the month-long approval process of deploying a superior desktop app to the org, or just pay the monthly fees of a SaaS (conveniently below the approval required threshold) and have a mediocre solution right now? The AppStore’s ease and secu…

This is true but only explains business apps.
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