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The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

adamierymenko.com

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Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#71

Post by cusenses »

jitl wrote: post #65
jiggawatts wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code has some of the worst product quality I've seen from Microsoft in quite a while. It doesn't hold a candle to IntelliJ or Visual Studio. Even directly comparable "lightweight" editors like ISE are far superior. Random examples of bad behaviour in commonly used parts that would affect just about every user: If you try to search & replace, it'll refuse to remember "replace in selection". It'll reset every time,…

> There's no memory for recent searches, so if you've just spent ten minutes carefully crafting a regex and you accidentally click the wrong thing, then it is gone forever. It has this now, although the click target is some teensy text. (I also find the search very frustrating, like it replacing the search with your current selection sometimes)

Up arrow within the textbox also works to restore previous searches.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#72

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

the_only_law wrote: post #28
hrififjkrjr wrote: post #16

The usual retort is "people use Electron because they only know web technologies". No, it's not only that. I've been programming GUI apps for 30 years, going through TurboVision, Delphi, MFC, WinForms, wxWidgets, Qt, WPF, native Android/iPhone, and probably 2 more I forgot about. They all suck terribly when compared to React/Vue/HTML/CSS. Creating a GUI app with web tech it's just so much more productive. It's like c…

I wanted to do a mockup of a UI a few moth back. It was moderately complex, I suppose. And I was just trying to find something that would let me build out a shell. I started on Linux and I found most of the UI frameworks to be quite disappointed and a bit involved for what I was wanting to do. I think I was splaying with Glade and then QT creator and realizing just how much boilerplate code I'd have to write to get t…

Lazarus is still pretty nice for putting together an app: the Cocoa port is still a bit unstable, but the app it self captures a lot of what was great about Delphi in the 90s

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#73

Post by kitsunesoba »

manigandham wrote: post #35
bernardv wrote: post #26

The webification of Desktop app GUI’s is the result of a total disregard for usability .. from a user’s point-of-view (not a developer’s point-of-view of what users >should As a user, I don’t care about the dev’s challenge of supporting multiple OS’s. These best experience comes when I load up a new application and can intuitively navigate it without the mental overload required trying to decipher a GUI layout which…

I agree that there's a lot of form-over-function and bad usability decisions in apps but that's completely separate from the underlying frameworks and distribution technology. You can have great webapps and terrible native apps. Also when it comes to usability, users prefer having a consistent UI over a "native" UI, especially as the number of devices have exploded between laptops, phones and tablets. Slack looks and…

> I agree that there's a lot of form-over-function and bad usability decisions in apps but that's completely separate from the underlying frameworks and distribution technology. You can have great webapps and terrible native apps.

I may be wrong in this but I feel that lot of the push for Electron and the like is for the styling capabilities it brings compared to native toolkits. In the case of many Electron apps, especially simpler ones, maintaining something in Qt or even WPF/AppKit/etc wouldn't be a challenge, as long as the dev is willing to use standard widgets. An inordinate amount of energy and resources has been spent on turning apps into an arm of branding/marketing.

> Also when it comes to usability, users prefer having a consistent UI over a "native" UI, especially as the number of devices have exploded between laptops, phones and tablets. Slack looks and works the same everywhere, and that's one of it's advantages.

Slack is a bit of a funny example, that's one app where I'd greatly prefer to run the iOS app on desktop if I could. The web/electron version is a mess.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#74

Post by dccoolgai »

bernardv wrote: post #26

The webification of Desktop app GUI’s is the result of a total disregard for usability .. from a user’s point-of-view (not a developer’s point-of-view of what users >should As a user, I don’t care about the dev’s challenge of supporting multiple OS’s. These best experience comes when I load up a new application and can intuitively navigate it without the mental overload required trying to decipher a GUI layout which…

> Most young devs I speak to stare blankly at me when I enquire about GUI standards and usability best-practices. They are now foreign concepts to a lot of developers.

Was there ever really a time when this was de rigeur? I certainly feel it should be, but I've always felt alone having an intense interest in this as a dev.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#75

Post by cusenses »

jiggawatts wrote: post #64
gobookdev wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code is my favourite software of all time, no need to use the menu bar with the command pallete and the excellent custom keybinds. It completely gets out of the way it is still more feature rich than any IDE through extensions. A blinking cursor is a small price to pay, I haven't even noticed that. I know it's not meant to be good being written in mostly TypeScript, but it just is.

VS Code has some of the worst product quality I've seen from Microsoft in quite a while. It doesn't hold a candle to IntelliJ or Visual Studio. Even directly comparable "lightweight" editors like ISE are far superior. Random examples of bad behaviour in commonly used parts that would affect just about every user: If you try to search & replace, it'll refuse to remember "replace in selection". It'll reset every time,…

Every tools takes getting used to and learning it's quirks. Where there are problems within VS Code, there will be different problems in IntelliJ. I quite like VS Code while disliking IntelliJ. Same old story of differing preferences.

> Someone thought that manually editing JSON files is a suitable GUI for configuring basic settings.

There has been a GUI editor for settings for a while now, as well as the JSON editor.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#76

Post by titzer »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #23

Electron is a large step backwards in usability and software quality. Spotify has its own context menus which don't support arrow keys or type select. GitHub Desktop has a "Select All" which doesn't actually Select All, only what's been paged in. VSCode doesn't confirm key equivalents by highlighting the menu bar. All of them blink the cursor even without typing focus. All of them steal focus at launch. Our UI vocabu…

> The web is not only eating the desktop: it's eating what it means to be an expert computer user.

Nailed it. Instability is the enemy of mastery. In order to fully grok things, they need to be stable long enough to be grokked. Software has stopped being stable long enough to become an expert.

Brains learn. And then a brain that is forced to unlearn and relearn enough times eventually learns to not bother learning. So no one even bothers to become an expert anymore.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#77

Post by feifan »

dccoolgai wrote: post #74
bernardv wrote: post #26

The webification of Desktop app GUI’s is the result of a total disregard for usability .. from a user’s point-of-view (not a developer’s point-of-view of what users >should As a user, I don’t care about the dev’s challenge of supporting multiple OS’s. These best experience comes when I load up a new application and can intuitively navigate it without the mental overload required trying to decipher a GUI layout which…

> Most young devs I speak to stare blankly at me when I enquire about GUI standards and usability best-practices. They are now foreign concepts to a lot of developers. Was there ever really a time when this was de rigeur? I certainly feel it should be, but I've always felt alone having an intense interest in this as a dev.

There are dozens of us![0]

I can't really speak to the first question, but I know of a small handful of people (who are developers or software-adjacent) who are deeply familiar with nuanced GUI details and can consciously talk about them. Plausibly, many people have historically not noticed many of these details, but got them for free when most software was built with native controls … and because they were rarely noticed, they rarely get explicitly specced for UIs built on less-robust primitives.

[^0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/36twsr/what_i...

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#78

Post by perryizgr8 »

Even though electron apps are strange and quirky compared to native apps, I am thankful they are being made.

The other option is what Google is doing. No native apps at all. Have a chrome tab open for everything. Chat, Gmail, calender, meet, YouTube music. Evrything in its own tab, no apps for any platform. Fuck that.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#79

Post by westoncb »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #23

Electron is a large step backwards in usability and software quality. Spotify has its own context menus which don't support arrow keys or type select. GitHub Desktop has a "Select All" which doesn't actually Select All, only what's been paged in. VSCode doesn't confirm key equivalents by highlighting the menu bar. All of them blink the cursor even without typing focus. All of them steal focus at launch. Our UI vocabu…

Electron seems to have reached the status of being a political topic. For many people it's something to rally around or (more frequently here) against. You're either for it or against it.

The above arguments would not be taken seriously on another topic, but here their weakness can be overlooked (by some) since folks are already committed to the the stance they support.

Look at the argument more closely: they're naming several random bugs. You can name several random bugs related to any UI framework on the planet with a sufficient user count. It's meaningless.

I'd urge people to look a little closer at arguments being put forward by the anti-Electron faction here if you don't yet have data yourself.

For myself, whenever I read these kinds of comments (or the tiresome refrain about absurd memory usage) it feels to me like there must be two Electrons: the first being the Electron which is the foundation of nearly every app I actually find useful these days (which do not exhibit e.g. exorbitant memory consumption issues [it's a marginal, non-issue increase in my experience] or higher bug-rates than native apps)—and then there's the second Electron, which afaict is a conceptual construction supporting a particular perspective on the 'correct' way of writing software (hint: anything using web tech isn't it).

Edit: something that would help move legitimate analysis of this topic forward: comparisons to other frameworks should be made after normalizing with respect to feature count/complexity, i.e. how much higher is memory usage vs. a competing app that actually offers similar features—e.g. comparing Discord to an IRC client would not be particularly informative (but that kind of mismatched comparison seems to be a common source of misconceptions here)

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#80

Post by kumarvvr »

I always thought that deploying web apps as desktop apps is a great thing to do. As in, not bunch it up into electron, but using shell scripting to start a local only web server and send a command to the OS to open a localhost page.

The advantages are that you don't need bloated software to do stuff, you have the full power of the OS, because you have a local webserver running, you have access to the file system, etc, you have the choice to use any programming language and framework (not be limited to JS), etc.

I keep thinking why people don't go this way. Are there any glaring mistakes to this approach I am unable to see?

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