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What a perfect HN reply. Webapp bad. Native good. No justification. Just a bunch of generalizations. Gmail empowers me. Wikipedia empowers me. Github empowers

What a perfect HN reply. Webapp bad. Native good. No justification. Just a bunch of generalizations. Gmail empowers me. Wikipedia empowers me. Github empowers me. Of course native application are important. You don't need to rely on those moralistic justifications.

xeromal 6y ago
hahahaha. It's nice to see there's still reasonable people here. Not all of us have the mental fortitude to "empower" our lives.
saagarjha 6y ago
You may not be aware of this, but the person you replied to has worked for years on a native UI toolkit. And they provide justification, too: skills don’t transfer between websites as readily as they do between apps. And while I wouldn’t associate we applications are somehow morally inferior, the fact is that many of today’s issues with increasing friction to drive engagement originated on the web and are easy to perpetuate on the web.
openfuture 6y ago
Worst thing that ever happened to HN was self-awareness, now your comment is worse than if it had just focused on what he was saying rather than where he said it and my comment is also worse because I included this paragraph. We should probably ban mentioning that this is HN on HN. He said something like "OS apps have the quality of being windows, you can open different windows into the same data" (okay he literally said "bringing knowledge from one app to another" but it can be re-framed as bringing different apps to the same knowledge - which I argue is more characteristic of the "local experience"). Your "refutation" was to list a few web apps that are considered useful. A more sane way to refute his argument is to talk about open APIs and how you can bring your data into different contexts using these tools as well as GUI web tools like these things for converting file types, making small adjustments to PDFs, GSuite or other tools. However that refutation falls on its face when you want the window quality; i.e. looking at the same data with different perspectives. The reason is that the computers running these web systems are foreign and disjoint so you are dealing with a distributed system, sometimes you are lucky enough that it was designed to function how you are using it (google suite is this to some extent), however most of the time you have to bring your data to them to use these utilities and then things float out of sync as you move between tools and your Downloads folder fills up with intermediate artefacts. We are moving back to the local system, and Electron (and those browser APIs for local storage and persistence) are steps in the conversion process. Eventually we will abandon browsers (read: Chrome) altogether in favor of "package management"; something like nix-shell (except secure) has a much more user-friendly social contract while being pretty much the same UI as a browser (but still much much much worse UX). That's where we will end up (some evidence: NLNet is funding the nix-packaging of all the projects they support).
gindely 6y ago
> What a perfect HN reply. ... No justification. I disagree, therefore the stuff you wrote didn't exist. I mean, don't you think it's a little rude? Think first, engage keyboard later.

xeromal 6y ago

hahahaha. It's nice to see there's still reasonable people here. Not all of us have the mental fortitude to "empower" our lives.

saagarjha 6y ago

You may not be aware of this, but the person you replied to has worked for years on a native UI toolkit. And they provide justification, too: skills don’t transfer between websites as readily as they do between apps. And while I wouldn’t associate we applications are somehow morally inferior, the fact is that many of today’s issues with increasing friction to drive engagement originated on the web and are easy to perpetuate on the web.

openfuture 6y ago

Worst thing that ever happened to HN was self-awareness, now your comment is worse than if it had just focused on what he was saying rather than where he said it and my comment is also worse because I included this paragraph. We should probably ban mentioning that this is HN on HN. He said something like "OS apps have the quality of being windows, you can open different windows into the same data" (okay he literally said "bringing knowledge from one app to another" but it can be re-framed as bringing different apps to the same knowledge - which I argue is more characteristic of the "local experience"). Your "refutation" was to list a few web apps that are considered useful. A more sane way to refute his argument is to talk about open APIs and how you can bring your data into different contexts using these tools as well as GUI web tools like these things for converting file types, making small adjustments to PDFs, GSuite or other tools. However that refutation falls on its face when you want the window quality; i.e. looking at the same data with different perspectives. The reason is that the computers running these web systems are foreign and disjoint so you are dealing with a distributed system, sometimes you are lucky enough that it was designed to function how you are using it (google suite is this to some extent), however most of the time you have to bring your data to them to use these utilities and then things float out of sync as you move between tools and your Downloads folder fills up with intermediate artefacts. We are moving back to the local system, and Electron (and those browser APIs for local storage and persistence) are steps in the conversion process. Eventually we will abandon browsers (read: Chrome) altogether in favor of "package management"; something like nix-shell (except secure) has a much more user-friendly social contract while being pretty much the same UI as a browser (but still much much much worse UX). That's where we will end up (some evidence: NLNet is funding the nix-packaging of all the projects they support).

gindely 6y ago

> What a perfect HN reply. ... No justification. I disagree, therefore the stuff you wrote didn't exist. I mean, don't you think it's a little rude? Think first, engage keyboard later.