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> Meanwhile, your web app may not be as good as native apps, but at least you don't have to write it 6 times. I must be living in a parallel world because I us
by jcelerier 6y ago
> Meanwhile, your web app may not be as good as native apps, but at least you don't have to write it 6 times.
I must be living in a parallel world because I use a ton of desktop apps that aren't "written 6 times" - and write a few, including a music & other things sequencer (https://ossia.io https://ossia.io).
Just amongst the ones running on my desktop right now, Strawberry (Qt), Firefox (their own toolkit), QtCreator (Qt), Telegram Desktop (Qt), Bitwig Studio (Java), Kate (Qt), Ripcord (Qt), all work on all desktop platforms with a single codebase. I also often use Zim (GTK), which is also available on all platforms, occasionnally Krita (Qt) and GIMP (GTK), and somewhat rarely Blender. Not an HTML DOM in sight (except FF :-)).
- guggle 6y agoBitwig has been ported to Android ? Or IOS ?
- jcelerier 6y agoI don't think it makes sense to use it on even small laptops screen to be honest so I don't really see the point. You'd have to redo the UI and whole paradigm entirely anyways for it to be meaningful on small devices. But there is certainly not any obstacle to porting - from my own experience with ossia & Qt, it is fairly easy to make iOS and Android builds, the difficulty is in finding a proper iOS and Android UX. In particular C++ code works on every machine that can drive a screen without too much trouble - if the app is built in C++ you can at least make the code run on the device... just have to make something pretty out of it afterwards.
- guggle 6y agoThe point is that the parent poster mentioned tablets and phones which you don't address in your point. Of course your examples aren't written 6 times, but they support fewer platforms too (only desktop). Off-topic, but regarding Bitwig: of course it makes perfect sense to use it on smaller devices. Not phones, but tablets. It's even officially supported with a specific display profile in your user interface settings (obvious target amongst others: windows surface). This is particularly useful for musicians on stage.
- avmich 6y agoDo you count Qt apps as native, but not count web apps as native? Why?
- AsyncAwait 6y agoQt may not 'look' native, but it has native performance, whereas Electron really doesn't.
- thawaway1837 6y agoIsn’t that more of an Electron issue? I mean, is anyone clamouring for VS Code, for example, to be rewritten in native toolkits?
- outside1234 6y agoVSCode is indistinguishable from native, so not sure its Electron that's at fault here.
- eyegor 6y agoIf I recall correctly, Microsoft forked their own version of electron to make vs code feel more snappy. Because normal electron runs like slack.
- RMPR 6y agoI don't think so, Microsoft wanted to fork electron in the past to replace Chromium with edgeHTML, but it didn't happen. VSCode is powered by Monaco Editor github.com/microsoft/monaco-editor, and VSCode feels snappier than let's say Atom, probably because of Typescript.
- andai 6y agoIf your native apps are indistinguishable from VSCode, they're doing something wrong.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
- ninjakeyboard 6y agoI still can't believe bitwig is java. I'm a bitwig user. It even runs on linux.
- hawaiianbrah 6y agoWasn’t that Java’s original selling point, it runs anywhere (there’s a JVM)?
- suyash 6y agoYes, today you can use JavaFx to build cross platform desktop apps.
- hawaiianbrah 6y agoSounds like that’s the Java Swing replacement for the same thing you could do over a decade ago?
- ubercow13 6y agoOnly part of it will be Java, probably the UI logic layer
- effie 6y agoOnly small part, the core is C++ and assembly. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwig/comments/4c2zoh/what_programming_language_andor_framework_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwig/comments/4c2zoh/what_program...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nitrogen 6y agoOssia looks pretty sweet! I'll be checking that out for sure.
- jcelerier 6y agothanks ! it's still kinda in alpha but making progress :)
- IvanK_net 6y agoI think he did not mean "written 6 times", but more like Compiled 6 times, with 6 different sets of parameters, and having to be tested on 6 different devices.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoBecause you NEVER have to do that with browsers, right?
- colordrops 6y agoYou don't have to sign and deploy your web app six times.
- Kipters 6y agoYou have to do it anyway if you're using Electron
- colordrops 6y agoThat's not a web app then.
- Kipters 6y agoIsn't it? The UI is rendered using web technologies inside a specialized browser and it's written in a web-specific language. I might consider an electron app an hybrid app (that leans heavily towards the web side), but for sure not a native app
- irishcoffee 6y agoCI/CD + uh... doing your job? I build one app (same codebase) on 4 different platforms often, it isn't terribly hard.
- madeofpalk 6y agoI don’t know, I think they did mean that. You write an app for the Mac... how do you ship on Windows as well?
- _bxg1 6y agoIn my experience Java GUIs are consistently even more laggy and unresponsive than Electron apps. They may be lighter in terms of memory, but they never feel lighter. Even IntelliJ and family - supposedly the state of the art in Java apps - feel like mud on a brand-new 16" Macbook Pro.
- eyegor 6y agoInterestingly they seem to run exactly the same on horribly low spec machines. I blame the jvm's love for boxing and unboxing everything in IL land. Of course by now I'd hope it's less wasteful - last I spent serious time in Java was 2015.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nv-vn 6y agoI've definitely noticed the same on IntelliJ but weirdly enough Eclipse feels just fine. IIRC both are written in Java, so maybe it comes down to the design of IntelliJ moreso than the limitations of the JVM?
- _bxg1 6y agoI used Eclipse for a while before switching to IntelliJ around ~2015 and it actually seemed like a vast improvement, not just in terms of features but in terms of performance. It still wasn't "snappy", but I figured I was doing heavy work so that was just how it was. Fast-forward 5 years and I've been doing JS in VSCode for a while. My current company offered to pay for Webstorm so I gave it a try. Lo and behold it was still sludgy, but now unbearable to me because I've gotten used to VSCode. The one other major Java app I've used is DBeaver, which has the same problem to an even greater degree. Luckily I don't have to use it super often.
- saagarjha 6y agoEclipse interestingly uses native controls which it hooks up to Java, while IntelliJ draws everything essentially.
- nicoburns 6y agoQT is excellent, but C++ is quite a tough pill to swallow for many. Especially as QT layers a macro system on top. I predict that native desktop apps will make a comeback when there's QT-quality cross-platform framework in a more approachable language (Rust, nim, or similar).
- searchableguy 6y agoThere are a few options. https://github.com/revery-ui/revery https://github.com/revery-ui/revery https://github.com/briskml/brisk https://github.com/briskml/brisk
- soraminazuki 6y agoWhy not use Qt bindings for $YOUR_LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE? https://wiki.qt.io/Language_Bindings https://wiki.qt.io/Language_Bindings
- mjevans 6y agoIt's rather clunky and often requires writing like C++ in whatever language of choice you're using, the worst of both worlds. I wonder what an API with both only C (or some other low level) bindings and designed to be easy to use externally might look like.
- kdot 6y agoFlutter for desktop solves this.
- 1cvmask 6y agoYour subdomain http://forum.ossia.io/ http://forum.ossia.io/ lacks an ssl certificate for the login mask. You can get wildcard ssl certificates for your domain and all subdomains from Letsencrypt.
- abiogenesis 6y ago...or just use CloudFlare, which will automatically take care of it.
- jcelerier 6y agoThanks for the info, gonna check.. we already have a cert, no clue what's missing precisely in the config, how can I try ?
- elbear 6y agoConfigure your HTTP server to serve that subdomain from HTTPS. Here's an example using nginx: https://linuxize.com/post/redirect-http-to-https-in-nginx/ https://linuxize.com/post/redirect-http-to-https-in-nginx/
- mjevans 6y agoI'd also love for Mac and Windows to make it really easy to get a vendor blessed version of QT installed. Imagine if when trying to run a QT app on Windows a dialog box could popup saying. "Program X is missing the Y, install from the Windows Store (for free): Yes / No"