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I still miss native software Give it a few more years and I think you might get your wish, at least if you use Apple or Microsoft OSes. The 90s marked the slo

I still miss native software Give it a few more years and I think you might get your wish, at least if you use Apple or Microsoft OSes. The 90s marked the slow demise of native non-Internet connected applications. The 2000s saw the rise of web apps. The early 2010s marked the rise of mobile first/only native apps. The late 2010s will see the rise of highly optimized singular platforms (MacOS/iOS, Win8/WinPhone, Android/ChromeOS?) designed to lock the user into the platform via tight inter app orchestration (native obviously) via cloud backed APIs.

perrylaj 12y ago
The only way I see native making a comeback is if this Net Neutrality issue gets in the way. Even in 'native' software, the web is becoming increasingly present.
- jbigelow76 12y ago
  Web apps became attractive for three reasons: 1. No deployment/client maintenance cost. The browser was already on every PC by the end of the 90s. 2. Connectivity. Web apps became the new thin clients with most UI coming from server side rendering and as well as data coming from the same servers. 3. Ubiquitous UI. Without getting cynical HTML/CSS is more or less the same on all browsers. Native apps mitigate the first two advantages and cast the third point as extremely suspect or at least irrelevant. 1. Apple introduced the Mac App Store and wrote brick and mortar software retailers like Best Buy out the equation. Microsoft is scrambling to keep up by moving things that were traditionally licensed via complex enterprise bundles into a la carte offerings like Office 365. 2. Connectivity. As somebody that considers themselves a web dev I really want to see a Net Neutral web win. But with almost all relevant web app activity being powered on the back end by a JSON/XML API the UI is no longer tightly coupled to server side HTML. Which brings us to point 3, the ubiquitous HTML UI... Decision makers don't care If you are a consumer or executive type you want your apps to look like all your other iOS apps. If you are a call center employee working on a web app you have no input into the app you work with anyway. Us web developers aren't doing HTML/CSS any favors by adopting frameworks that attempt to blur the lines between web and native apps like Angular, Ember, or Ionic. Disclaimer: I would prefer perrylaj is right and I am wrong. I just don't think that will be the case.
moron4hire 12y ago
I'm not so sure. We don't have the single-platform uberdominance that we used to have. Writing software for one platform will cause you to miss out on a very significant portion of users. And I think the trends in software, both on the development side and in the released units side, are showing more projects adopting a cross-platform strategy by default. But there are some major problems still. There are no good, cross-platform UI toolkits. They either support native widgets and have terrible APIs, or they have great APIs and their own, unique interpretation of what "native widgets" means (i.e. they aren't at all). I got so mad about the situation one day that I thought I might start my own UI toolkit project. Well, I only thought about it for about a minute before I realized how stupid that was. But when I think about the UI toolkit that has the most consistent support across all platforms, has the least enraging API, and the most potential to get better over time, I come to one conclusion... HTML. No. It's not great. I already said there are no good UI toolkits. But it's the only one that has the potential to make the world a nicer place.

perrylaj 12y ago

The only way I see native making a comeback is if this Net Neutrality issue gets in the way. Even in 'native' software, the web is becoming increasingly present.

jbigelow76 12y ago
Web apps became attractive for three reasons: 1. No deployment/client maintenance cost. The browser was already on every PC by the end of the 90s. 2. Connectivity. Web apps became the new thin clients with most UI coming from server side rendering and as well as data coming from the same servers. 3. Ubiquitous UI. Without getting cynical HTML/CSS is more or less the same on all browsers. Native apps mitigate the first two advantages and cast the third point as extremely suspect or at least irrelevant. 1. Apple introduced the Mac App Store and wrote brick and mortar software retailers like Best Buy out the equation. Microsoft is scrambling to keep up by moving things that were traditionally licensed via complex enterprise bundles into a la carte offerings like Office 365. 2. Connectivity. As somebody that considers themselves a web dev I really want to see a Net Neutral web win. But with almost all relevant web app activity being powered on the back end by a JSON/XML API the UI is no longer tightly coupled to server side HTML. Which brings us to point 3, the ubiquitous HTML UI... Decision makers don't care If you are a consumer or executive type you want your apps to look like all your other iOS apps. If you are a call center employee working on a web app you have no input into the app you work with anyway. Us web developers aren't doing HTML/CSS any favors by adopting frameworks that attempt to blur the lines between web and native apps like Angular, Ember, or Ionic. Disclaimer: I would prefer perrylaj is right and I am wrong. I just don't think that will be the case.

moron4hire 12y ago

I'm not so sure. We don't have the single-platform uberdominance that we used to have. Writing software for one platform will cause you to miss out on a very significant portion of users. And I think the trends in software, both on the development side and in the released units side, are showing more projects adopting a cross-platform strategy by default. But there are some major problems still. There are no good, cross-platform UI toolkits. They either support native widgets and have terrible APIs, or they have great APIs and their own, unique interpretation of what "native widgets" means (i.e. they aren't at all). I got so mad about the situation one day that I thought I might start my own UI toolkit project. Well, I only thought about it for about a minute before I realized how stupid that was. But when I think about the UI toolkit that has the most consistent support across all platforms, has the least enraging API, and the most potential to get better over time, I come to one conclusion... HTML. No. It's not great. I already said there are no good UI toolkits. But it's the only one that has the potential to make the world a nicer place.