5 ms·

I think you have a very narrow view of "the community" and what constitutes "popular desktop apps". What about applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Cubase, L

I think you have a very narrow view of "the community" and what constitutes "popular desktop apps". What about applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Cubase, Logic? Basically anything that does more than show a couple of editor panes. I'd love to see these kinds of things built in Electron but as far as I can tell this has not happened yet. In these areas languages like C++ and frameworks like Qt are still really really popular. Not to mention embedded development, of course.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> What about applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Cubase, Logic? That's the difference between toys and tools. Most of the popular applications are toys, and this saddens me a lot personally, because humanity is wasting the potential it has with all that cheap computing available. > I'd love to see these kinds of things built in Electron but as far as I can tell this has not happened yet. I don't see it happening any time soon. Web is not meant for serious tools. Compare Microsoft Office and Google's butt office suite. One is a tool, other is a toy that looks nice for simple documents, but is utterly unusable when your document/spreadsheet grows beyond more than a couple of pages.
- marknutter 10y ago
  > That's the difference between toys and tools. Most of the popular applications are toys, and this saddens me a lot personally, because humanity is wasting the potential it has with all that cheap computing available. I always wonder if pretentious people realize their pretentious and simply don't care, or they're actually oblivious. Perhaps you could enlighten me? The difference between a "toy" and a "tool" is whether or not something is mainly for fun or mainly for being productive. It has nothing to do with the process used to build it.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > I always wonder if pretentious people realize their pretentious and simply don't care, or they're actually oblivious. Perhaps you could enlighten me? They're just tired and try to highlight some problems that others don't care about. > The difference between a "toy" and a "tool" is whether or not something is mainly for fun or mainly for being productive. It has nothing to do with the process used to build it. The difference is the goal - is it supposed to help people be productive at their task, or is it just supposed to make such impression while in fact being there to extract money from naive customers? (Or is it a worse-is-better half-assed 20% solution?). Whether you like it or not, performance is a big part of usefulness of application. I brought up MS Office and Google's cloud-based solutions for a reason - only one of them can handle the load a professional user needs to handle. Quite often it's literally like a difference between a metal hammer[0] and a plastic one[1]. Both can, in theory, be used to drive nails, but there is kind of a difference in performance. [0] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Claw-hammer.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Claw-ham... [1] - http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/plastic-hammer-2181534.jpg http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/plastic-hammer-2181534.jpg
    - marknutter 10y ago
      So what you're saying is, all tools need to be designed for the power user or they're toys. I guess I should return my $10 hammer I bought from Home Depot and replace it with the $225 Stiletto TB15MS solid titanium hammer (http://www.amazon.com/Stiletto-TB15MS-TiBone-Titanium-Straight/dp/B00079R1YW http://www.amazon.com/Stiletto-TB15MS-TiBone-Titanium-Straig...).
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        No, I'm saying that plastic hammers shouldn't be sold in hardware stores, and also that trying to push plastic hammers on normal users and $10 hammers on power users is a very bad trend.
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    I think the previous author's point was more on point without using judgement-loaded words like "toy". There certainly are definitely classes of applications where sheer computing complexity or responsiveness probably means that we're a long way off from using web wrapped applications (eg Electron). High end graphics editing, video editing, and music DAWs certainly qualify in this category. Then again, from what I know, Premiere, Photoshop, and DAWs like Cubase and Logic are straight-up C++ applications, and don't even go into Java / Qt territory. I would say that something like Google Apps vs Microsoft Office is a lot closer than it used to be. Native-app Excel sheets for instance still have the edge in speed overall, especially for large datasets (say, >10,000 rows) better, and Excel has a pretty significant edge in my opinion for analysis (pivot tables, charts, etc.). Google Sheets however are very capable for a large percentage of documents, with the added benefit of being so much easier to share and collaborate. Neither use case is a "toy" scenario in my opinion.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Maybe I'm conflating several of my issues with webapps in the word "toy". One thing is ergonomics, bloat and lag issues. But the other thing is that webapps trying to fill in the role that originally belonged to desktop apps are more often than not pretty dumbed down. There are several reasons for that - one is performance, which makes you unable to add more complex features without making the entire webapp unbearably slow. Another is the business approach of sticking to MVPs and not really progressing beyond them. Also, lag issues are not really limited to high-end graphics / video editing. Sure, lag/low performance makes those tasks basically not doable in the browser. But even "ordinary" webapps - like word processors or issue trackers - are annoyingly slow. Take Jira for example - I'm probably wasting a few (billable) hours every month just because it's not a desktop app. So are all of my co-workers. It's most likely also the reason people tend to batch time reporting and do it once a week or so (it's much less distracting then), which as a result precludes management from having access to up-to-date information about time spent on tasks. Trivial inconveniences can have non-obvious impact.
      - marknutter 10y ago
        > Take Jira for example - I'm probably wasting a few (billable) hours every month just because it's not a desktop app. I think you'll find that Desktop apps often have to communicate with with centralized servers as well.
- patates 10y ago
  > Web is not meant for serious tools. Compare Microsoft Office and Google's butt office suite. Well, isn't that an ambiguous claim with a weak anecdotal evidence. What is a "serious tool"? We have our email, crm, analytics, (only) shop, document versioning, etc. online. Actually, the native applications I use are just Visual Studio (can be replaced by code), Sql Management Studio (many web-based alternatives) and the browser itself - that being the only type of application I use with no web-based alternative, which could be seen as an operating system.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Well, isn't that an ambiguous claim with a weak anecdotal evidence. Try working on a 20-page document or 5-page-long spreadsheet and see how long it takes before you get pissed off at the performance. Unless you're oblivious to it - I'm starting to believe more and more people don't even expect anymore that computers can work without constant lags and pauses. > the native applications I use are just Visual Studio (can be replaced by code) Now can it, really? > Sql Management Studio (many web-based alternatives) With even remotely similar feature sets?
    - patates 10y ago
      We have a giant list of archived support tickets in Office 365. They can be navigated nearly as fast as they can be navigated in native Excel app, through the 365 web app. I replaced Visual Studio already with Code for my personal projects. I expect it is just a matter of time before companies start to consider doing that too. Is it feature-complete? No, but not because it is an Electron-app, but because it's just young. SQL Server doesn't work on platforms other than Windows so the motivation for coming-up a feature-complete alternative is little. I could even then find a couple promising projects with a web search. For other databases such as Postgres and Mongo, there are many alternatives which provide more than their native GUIs. Rethink's main GUI is web-based, for example. A database management interface isn't challenging to implement as a web-app because web-apps are limited toys, but it is hard to do right in general.
      - 10y ago
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Meh. Microsoft Office pisses me off more with its constant crashes and weird bugs than Google Docs does. The latter has less functionality, but at least it's stable. Not to mention the vast majority of users don't need the advanced functionality anyway. If you're doing serious publishing work, sure, go ahead and use MS office. But 90% of common use cases are easily satisfied with Google Docs.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Microsoft Office pisses me off more with its constant crashes and weird bugs than Google Docs does. Crashes / weird bugs and MS Office... that's something new to me. I always considered MS Office to be a set of some of the most stable applications I've ever seen. Do you do something atypical, so that the bugs/crashes could be related to a platform or some rarely used features? I'm asking out of curiosity. Google Docs et al. don't just lack advanced functionality, they lack a lot of quite basic functionality too. But my point wrt. webapps is also one of ergonomics. I do a lot of work in Google Docs and Spreadsheets due to external reasons, and I absolutely hate the experience. No matter how fast a computer I use, the lag on the Google's office suite is very annoying and distracting. Like with some IDEs which are slow enough to make one unable to ever enter the state of flow, Google's spreadsheets routinely double the time I am spending on a task due to simple lag on almost every operation.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      >>Do you do something atypical, so that the bugs/crashes could be related to a platform or some rarely used features? I'm asking out of curiosity. Not that I can tell. I mean I run it inside a Windows 7 VM, but other than that, nothing atypical. One example of a bug that I can think of (because it happens consistently) is that Outlook 2013 taskbar icon shows the orange envelope to indicate that I have unread mail... when I don't have any. It drives me absolutely bonkers. I've also ran into more serious issues, for example yesterday when I pasted something from a web page into MS Word and it froze and crashed.
- wstrange 10y ago
  For 99% of business documents, Google Docs works just fine. Your needs are different, and that is cool - but it does not relegate web apps to "toy" status.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    My needs are pretty standard. I run an NGO and have some amount of paperwork and data tracking to do in a word processor and spreadsheet application. Due to the collaboration requirements, we're stuck with Google cloud suite (the choice was made back when there were zero reasonable cloud-enabled alternatives). Google's office suite is theoretically capable of doing most of the things I need[0], but the omnipresent lag when you try to work with a bigger document or (more often) several documents at once is very annoying and slows things down. Half a second here, five seconds there, and it all adds up to significant frustration. There's a significant difference between "theoretically X can be done with it" and "it is useful for doing X". You can drive nails with a plastic hammer after all (and most people don't even need the "additional" feature of pulling them out). [0] - which is partly because I reduce expectations of what I can do. Think of it as generalized Blub paradox - you think in terms of the tools you use. Get a better tool, and suddenly you can do more, do it better and do it faster.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> What about applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Cubase, Logic? That's the difference between toys and tools. Most of the popular applications are toys, and this saddens me a lot personally, because humanity is wasting the potential it has with all that cheap computing available. > I'd love to see these kinds of things built in Electron but as far as I can tell this has not happened yet. I don't see it happening any time soon. Web is not meant for serious tools. Compare Microsoft Office and Google's butt office suite. One is a tool, other is a toy that looks nice for simple documents, but is utterly unusable when your document/spreadsheet grows beyond more than a couple of pages.

marknutter 10y ago
> That's the difference between toys and tools. Most of the popular applications are toys, and this saddens me a lot personally, because humanity is wasting the potential it has with all that cheap computing available. I always wonder if pretentious people realize their pretentious and simply don't care, or they're actually oblivious. Perhaps you could enlighten me? The difference between a "toy" and a "tool" is whether or not something is mainly for fun or mainly for being productive. It has nothing to do with the process used to build it.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > I always wonder if pretentious people realize their pretentious and simply don't care, or they're actually oblivious. Perhaps you could enlighten me? They're just tired and try to highlight some problems that others don't care about. > The difference between a "toy" and a "tool" is whether or not something is mainly for fun or mainly for being productive. It has nothing to do with the process used to build it. The difference is the goal - is it supposed to help people be productive at their task, or is it just supposed to make such impression while in fact being there to extract money from naive customers? (Or is it a worse-is-better half-assed 20% solution?). Whether you like it or not, performance is a big part of usefulness of application. I brought up MS Office and Google's cloud-based solutions for a reason - only one of them can handle the load a professional user needs to handle. Quite often it's literally like a difference between a metal hammer[0] and a plastic one[1]. Both can, in theory, be used to drive nails, but there is kind of a difference in performance. [0] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Claw-hammer.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Claw-ham... [1] - http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/plastic-hammer-2181534.jpg http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/plastic-hammer-2181534.jpg
  - marknutter 10y ago
    So what you're saying is, all tools need to be designed for the power user or they're toys. I guess I should return my $10 hammer I bought from Home Depot and replace it with the $225 Stiletto TB15MS solid titanium hammer (http://www.amazon.com/Stiletto-TB15MS-TiBone-Titanium-Straight/dp/B00079R1YW http://www.amazon.com/Stiletto-TB15MS-TiBone-Titanium-Straig...).
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      No, I'm saying that plastic hammers shouldn't be sold in hardware stores, and also that trying to push plastic hammers on normal users and $10 hammers on power users is a very bad trend.
- soundwave106 10y ago
  I think the previous author's point was more on point without using judgement-loaded words like "toy". There certainly are definitely classes of applications where sheer computing complexity or responsiveness probably means that we're a long way off from using web wrapped applications (eg Electron). High end graphics editing, video editing, and music DAWs certainly qualify in this category. Then again, from what I know, Premiere, Photoshop, and DAWs like Cubase and Logic are straight-up C++ applications, and don't even go into Java / Qt territory. I would say that something like Google Apps vs Microsoft Office is a lot closer than it used to be. Native-app Excel sheets for instance still have the edge in speed overall, especially for large datasets (say, >10,000 rows) better, and Excel has a pretty significant edge in my opinion for analysis (pivot tables, charts, etc.). Google Sheets however are very capable for a large percentage of documents, with the added benefit of being so much easier to share and collaborate. Neither use case is a "toy" scenario in my opinion.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Maybe I'm conflating several of my issues with webapps in the word "toy". One thing is ergonomics, bloat and lag issues. But the other thing is that webapps trying to fill in the role that originally belonged to desktop apps are more often than not pretty dumbed down. There are several reasons for that - one is performance, which makes you unable to add more complex features without making the entire webapp unbearably slow. Another is the business approach of sticking to MVPs and not really progressing beyond them. Also, lag issues are not really limited to high-end graphics / video editing. Sure, lag/low performance makes those tasks basically not doable in the browser. But even "ordinary" webapps - like word processors or issue trackers - are annoyingly slow. Take Jira for example - I'm probably wasting a few (billable) hours every month just because it's not a desktop app. So are all of my co-workers. It's most likely also the reason people tend to batch time reporting and do it once a week or so (it's much less distracting then), which as a result precludes management from having access to up-to-date information about time spent on tasks. Trivial inconveniences can have non-obvious impact.
    - marknutter 10y ago
      > Take Jira for example - I'm probably wasting a few (billable) hours every month just because it's not a desktop app. I think you'll find that Desktop apps often have to communicate with with centralized servers as well.
patates 10y ago
> Web is not meant for serious tools. Compare Microsoft Office and Google's butt office suite. Well, isn't that an ambiguous claim with a weak anecdotal evidence. What is a "serious tool"? We have our email, crm, analytics, (only) shop, document versioning, etc. online. Actually, the native applications I use are just Visual Studio (can be replaced by code), Sql Management Studio (many web-based alternatives) and the browser itself - that being the only type of application I use with no web-based alternative, which could be seen as an operating system.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Well, isn't that an ambiguous claim with a weak anecdotal evidence. Try working on a 20-page document or 5-page-long spreadsheet and see how long it takes before you get pissed off at the performance. Unless you're oblivious to it - I'm starting to believe more and more people don't even expect anymore that computers can work without constant lags and pauses. > the native applications I use are just Visual Studio (can be replaced by code) Now can it, really? > Sql Management Studio (many web-based alternatives) With even remotely similar feature sets?
  - patates 10y ago
    We have a giant list of archived support tickets in Office 365. They can be navigated nearly as fast as they can be navigated in native Excel app, through the 365 web app. I replaced Visual Studio already with Code for my personal projects. I expect it is just a matter of time before companies start to consider doing that too. Is it feature-complete? No, but not because it is an Electron-app, but because it's just young. SQL Server doesn't work on platforms other than Windows so the motivation for coming-up a feature-complete alternative is little. I could even then find a couple promising projects with a web search. For other databases such as Postgres and Mongo, there are many alternatives which provide more than their native GUIs. Rethink's main GUI is web-based, for example. A database management interface isn't challenging to implement as a web-app because web-apps are limited toys, but it is hard to do right in general.
    - 10y ago
enraged_camel 10y ago
Meh. Microsoft Office pisses me off more with its constant crashes and weird bugs than Google Docs does. The latter has less functionality, but at least it's stable. Not to mention the vast majority of users don't need the advanced functionality anyway. If you're doing serious publishing work, sure, go ahead and use MS office. But 90% of common use cases are easily satisfied with Google Docs.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Microsoft Office pisses me off more with its constant crashes and weird bugs than Google Docs does. Crashes / weird bugs and MS Office... that's something new to me. I always considered MS Office to be a set of some of the most stable applications I've ever seen. Do you do something atypical, so that the bugs/crashes could be related to a platform or some rarely used features? I'm asking out of curiosity. Google Docs et al. don't just lack advanced functionality, they lack a lot of quite basic functionality too. But my point wrt. webapps is also one of ergonomics. I do a lot of work in Google Docs and Spreadsheets due to external reasons, and I absolutely hate the experience. No matter how fast a computer I use, the lag on the Google's office suite is very annoying and distracting. Like with some IDEs which are slow enough to make one unable to ever enter the state of flow, Google's spreadsheets routinely double the time I am spending on a task due to simple lag on almost every operation.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    >>Do you do something atypical, so that the bugs/crashes could be related to a platform or some rarely used features? I'm asking out of curiosity. Not that I can tell. I mean I run it inside a Windows 7 VM, but other than that, nothing atypical. One example of a bug that I can think of (because it happens consistently) is that Outlook 2013 taskbar icon shows the orange envelope to indicate that I have unread mail... when I don't have any. It drives me absolutely bonkers. I've also ran into more serious issues, for example yesterday when I pasted something from a web page into MS Word and it froze and crashed.
wstrange 10y ago
For 99% of business documents, Google Docs works just fine. Your needs are different, and that is cool - but it does not relegate web apps to "toy" status.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  My needs are pretty standard. I run an NGO and have some amount of paperwork and data tracking to do in a word processor and spreadsheet application. Due to the collaboration requirements, we're stuck with Google cloud suite (the choice was made back when there were zero reasonable cloud-enabled alternatives). Google's office suite is theoretically capable of doing most of the things I need[0], but the omnipresent lag when you try to work with a bigger document or (more often) several documents at once is very annoying and slows things down. Half a second here, five seconds there, and it all adds up to significant frustration. There's a significant difference between "theoretically X can be done with it" and "it is useful for doing X". You can drive nails with a plastic hammer after all (and most people don't even need the "additional" feature of pulling them out). [0] - which is partly because I reduce expectations of what I can do. Think of it as generalized Blub paradox - you think in terms of the tools you use. Get a better tool, and suddenly you can do more, do it better and do it faster.