3 ms·

> if your goal is to solve some specific problem for yourself, your friends/family, community or your team, then the "last step" you mention - the one that "tak

by rurp 7mo ago

> if your goal is to solve some specific problem for yourself, your friends/family, community or your team, then the "last step" you mention - the one that "takes majority of time and effort" - is entirely unnecessary, irrelevant, and a waste of time. To a point, but I think this overstates it by quite a bit. At the moment I'm weighing some tradeoffs around this myself. I'm currently making an app for a niche interest of mine. I have a few acquaintances who would find it useful as well but I'm not sure if I want to take that on. If I keep the project for personal use I can make a lot of simplifying decisions like just running it on my own machine and using the CLI for certain steps. To deploy this to for non-tech users I need to figure out a whole deployment approach, make the UI more polished, and worry more about bugs and uptime. It sucks to get invested in some software that then constantly starts breaking or crashing. GenAI will help with this somewhat, but certainly won't drop the extra coding time cost down to zero.

PaulHoule 7mo ago
People today say "web applications suck", "Electron sucks", etc. They weren't around in the 1990s where IT departments were breaking under the load of maintaining desktop apps, when we were just getting on the security update treadmill, and where most shops that made applications for Windows had a dedicated InstallShield engineer and maybe even a dedicated tester for the install process.
- nogridbag 7mo ago
  I wish we had a dedicated InstallShield engineer! I had to design and burn my own discs for the desktop apps I built. And for some reason, the LightScribe drive was installed on the receptionist's computer. I have no idea why, but I was a new hire and I didn't question much.
- steve1977 7mo ago
  Maintaining desktop apps was not really harder than maintaining the current Kubernetes-Web-App behemoths, at least in my experience.
  - PaulHoule 7mo ago
    Yeah, we traded managing files and registry entries on desktops for something that violates all the principles of the science-of-systems, the kind of thing Perrow warns about in his book Normal Accidents.
    - chickensong 7mo ago
      I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. Managing files and registry entries wasn't much of a problem, but supporting an ever-growing matrix of versions across multiple platforms that were released into the wild was an issue. Modern evergreen apps kind of fix this, but you're still dealing with other people's computers and environments. Operating a service reliably is of course filled with different problems, but at least you have full control.
      - tharkun__ 7mo ago
        This so much. As a user, especially a private user, I want my apps I can install and run locally, no internet connection, nobody forces updates on me for an app that does exactly what I need and I'm used to it. As a developer, SaaS all the way. I really really love not having to deal with versions, release branches galore, hotfixes on different releases and all that jazz. I'm so glad I could leave that behind and we have a single Cloud "version" i.e. whatever the latest commit on the main branch is. Sure we might be a few commits behind head in what's actually currently deployed to all the production envs but that's so much more manageable than thousands upon thousands of customers on different versions and with direct control over your database. We also have a non-SaaS version we still support and I'm so glad I don't have to deal with it any longer and someone else does. Very bad memories of customers telling you they didn't do something and when you get the logs/database excerpt (finally, after spending way too much times debugging and talking to them already) you can clearly see that they did fudge with the database ...
      - steve1977 7mo ago
        > but you're still dealing with other people's computers and environments. We have to differentiate a bit between consumer and enterprise environments a bit here. My comment was in regards to the latter, where other people's computers basically were under our full control.
- jhatemyjob 7mo ago
  Windows was so bad that it made the web bad. Imagine the world we'd be in today if Internet Explorer never existed.
  - PaulHoule 7mo ago
    Well back in the 1990s Apple was on the ropes. Classic MacOS was designed to support handling events from the keyboard, mouse and floppy in 1984 and adding events from the internet broke it. It was fun using a Mac and being able to get all your work done without touching a command line, but for a while it crashed, crashed and crashed when you tried to browse the web until that fateful version where they added locks to stop the crashes but then it was beachball... beachball... beachball... They took investment from Microsoft at their bottom and then they came out with OS X which is as POSIXy as any modern OS and was able to handle running a web browser. In the 1990s you could also run Linux and at the time I thought Linux was far ahead of Windows in every way. Granted there were many categories of software like office suites that were not available, but installing most software was ./configure make sudo make install but if your system was unusual (Linux in 1994, Solaris in 2004) you might need to patch the source somewhere.
    - jhatemyjob 7mo ago
      If it wasn't for NeXT and Valve we would still be in the dark ages. Linux sucked for gaming until Valve poured all that money into Wine. I started with Windows 98. Didn't experience OSX until 2010. 9 years wasted.
      - pjmlp 7mo ago
        It still sucks for gaming, those are Windows games running on Proton, not much different from running arcade games with MAME, Amiga games with WinUAE,...
        queenkjuul 7mo ago
        I think it is different. As someone joked, "thanks to Wine, Win32 is the 'stable Linux ABI'" -- translating system calls is a lot different than emulating hardware, and the results prove it

by rurp 7mo ago

PaulHoule 7mo ago

People today say "web applications suck", "Electron sucks", etc. They weren't around in the 1990s where IT departments were breaking under the load of maintaining desktop apps, when we were just getting on the security update treadmill, and where most shops that made applications for Windows had a dedicated InstallShield engineer and maybe even a dedicated tester for the install process.

nogridbag 7mo ago
I wish we had a dedicated InstallShield engineer! I had to design and burn my own discs for the desktop apps I built. And for some reason, the LightScribe drive was installed on the receptionist's computer. I have no idea why, but I was a new hire and I didn't question much.
steve1977 7mo ago
Maintaining desktop apps was not really harder than maintaining the current Kubernetes-Web-App behemoths, at least in my experience.
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  Yeah, we traded managing files and registry entries on desktops for something that violates all the principles of the science-of-systems, the kind of thing Perrow warns about in his book Normal Accidents.
  - chickensong 7mo ago
    I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. Managing files and registry entries wasn't much of a problem, but supporting an ever-growing matrix of versions across multiple platforms that were released into the wild was an issue. Modern evergreen apps kind of fix this, but you're still dealing with other people's computers and environments. Operating a service reliably is of course filled with different problems, but at least you have full control.
    - tharkun__ 7mo ago
      This so much. As a user, especially a private user, I want my apps I can install and run locally, no internet connection, nobody forces updates on me for an app that does exactly what I need and I'm used to it. As a developer, SaaS all the way. I really really love not having to deal with versions, release branches galore, hotfixes on different releases and all that jazz. I'm so glad I could leave that behind and we have a single Cloud "version" i.e. whatever the latest commit on the main branch is. Sure we might be a few commits behind head in what's actually currently deployed to all the production envs but that's so much more manageable than thousands upon thousands of customers on different versions and with direct control over your database. We also have a non-SaaS version we still support and I'm so glad I don't have to deal with it any longer and someone else does. Very bad memories of customers telling you they didn't do something and when you get the logs/database excerpt (finally, after spending way too much times debugging and talking to them already) you can clearly see that they did fudge with the database ...
    - steve1977 7mo ago
      > but you're still dealing with other people's computers and environments. We have to differentiate a bit between consumer and enterprise environments a bit here. My comment was in regards to the latter, where other people's computers basically were under our full control.
jhatemyjob 7mo ago
Windows was so bad that it made the web bad. Imagine the world we'd be in today if Internet Explorer never existed.
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  Well back in the 1990s Apple was on the ropes. Classic MacOS was designed to support handling events from the keyboard, mouse and floppy in 1984 and adding events from the internet broke it. It was fun using a Mac and being able to get all your work done without touching a command line, but for a while it crashed, crashed and crashed when you tried to browse the web until that fateful version where they added locks to stop the crashes but then it was beachball... beachball... beachball... They took investment from Microsoft at their bottom and then they came out with OS X which is as POSIXy as any modern OS and was able to handle running a web browser. In the 1990s you could also run Linux and at the time I thought Linux was far ahead of Windows in every way. Granted there were many categories of software like office suites that were not available, but installing most software was ./configure make sudo make install but if your system was unusual (Linux in 1994, Solaris in 2004) you might need to patch the source somewhere.
  - jhatemyjob 7mo ago
    If it wasn't for NeXT and Valve we would still be in the dark ages. Linux sucked for gaming until Valve poured all that money into Wine. I started with Windows 98. Didn't experience OSX until 2010. 9 years wasted.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      It still sucks for gaming, those are Windows games running on Proton, not much different from running arcade games with MAME, Amiga games with WinUAE,...
      - queenkjuul 7mo ago
        I think it is different. As someone joked, "thanks to Wine, Win32 is the 'stable Linux ABI'" -- translating system calls is a lot different than emulating hardware, and the results prove it