4 ms·

The story of basically every native Windows app that got rewritten as a web app. It'll run in Chrome on Linux, but good luck writing a GTK+ or Qt app that will

by cbhl 9y ago

The story of basically every native Windows app that got rewritten as a web app. It'll run in Chrome on Linux, but good luck writing a GTK+ or Qt app that will interface with the underlying protocol.

jimjimjim 9y ago
Yep, web apps are just plan bad, but i can understand why a startup might go that way to shorten time to market, but replacing a native app with a web app should be a shootable offense
- mrastro 9y ago
  This is a good rule of thumb, but web apps have the serious advantage of being (nearly, excluding differences between browsers) platform-agnostic. This saves development time as you pointed out but also allows easier cross-platform support. For example, Skype which wasn't officially supported on Linux (it was left frozen at some ancient version) until it was ported to a web app. After this change, Linux gets the same latest version as all other operating systems. I don't know about you, but I'd trade any reasonable performance degradation for broader support of a product I use.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    The problem is that it is exponential, to the point of having a couple of applications running at the same time, requires a CRAY class computer.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Reasonable, mmkay? Every other webapp-in-a-wrapper seems to go the Win95 way, which was "mine is the only app on the whole computer, let's just hog all the resources!" Nowadays they must be mining bitcoin or whatever, because I don't see what else a messaging app needs a whole core for its entire runtime (looking at you, Slack Desktop).
robertelder 9y ago
Oh hey Michael, how's it going? Yeah, Microsoft has a lot of amazing initiatives to virtualize, emulate, and wrap interfaces around everything in the universe, which is a smart idea long-term, but they never seem to get to the phase of actually optimizing it. Someday, when we convert our entire race into pure energy, we will be able to seamlessly shift between between different levels of indirection in our matrix-like universe, but for now I'm having a lot of trouble just trying to open a single application in the first 4 minutes of booting up a Windows machine. It never used to be so bad, but every year it just keeps getting worse.
zanny 9y ago
My only gripe about Matrix is the lack of a good desktop client, but at the same time trying to wire WebRTC into a desktop app feels almost as bad as C++03 did. Gstreamer just got support for it, but I have no idea if thats enough to implement voice / video conferencing in a Matrix implementation.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  It's not exactly what you're describing, but to see an example of a video conference running within a Matrix client... https://youtu.be/y0-j4Q77KXM?t=14m47s https://youtu.be/y0-j4Q77KXM?t=14m47s

by cbhl 9y ago

The story of basically every native Windows app that got rewritten as a web app. It'll run in Chrome on Linux, but good luck writing a GTK+ or Qt app that will interface with the underlying protocol.

jimjimjim 9y ago

Yep, web apps are just plan bad, but i can understand why a startup might go that way to shorten time to market, but replacing a native app with a web app should be a shootable offense

mrastro 9y ago
This is a good rule of thumb, but web apps have the serious advantage of being (nearly, excluding differences between browsers) platform-agnostic. This saves development time as you pointed out but also allows easier cross-platform support. For example, Skype which wasn't officially supported on Linux (it was left frozen at some ancient version) until it was ported to a web app. After this change, Linux gets the same latest version as all other operating systems. I don't know about you, but I'd trade any reasonable performance degradation for broader support of a product I use.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The problem is that it is exponential, to the point of having a couple of applications running at the same time, requires a CRAY class computer.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Reasonable, mmkay? Every other webapp-in-a-wrapper seems to go the Win95 way, which was "mine is the only app on the whole computer, let's just hog all the resources!" Nowadays they must be mining bitcoin or whatever, because I don't see what else a messaging app needs a whole core for its entire runtime (looking at you, Slack Desktop).

robertelder 9y ago

Oh hey Michael, how's it going? Yeah, Microsoft has a lot of amazing initiatives to virtualize, emulate, and wrap interfaces around everything in the universe, which is a smart idea long-term, but they never seem to get to the phase of actually optimizing it. Someday, when we convert our entire race into pure energy, we will be able to seamlessly shift between between different levels of indirection in our matrix-like universe, but for now I'm having a lot of trouble just trying to open a single application in the first 4 minutes of booting up a Windows machine. It never used to be so bad, but every year it just keeps getting worse.

zanny 9y ago

My only gripe about Matrix is the lack of a good desktop client, but at the same time trying to wire WebRTC into a desktop app feels almost as bad as C++03 did. Gstreamer just got support for it, but I have no idea if thats enough to implement voice / video conferencing in a Matrix implementation.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
It's not exactly what you're describing, but to see an example of a video conference running within a Matrix client... https://youtu.be/y0-j4Q77KXM?t=14m47s https://youtu.be/y0-j4Q77KXM?t=14m47s