6 ms·

> 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

> 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.

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.