It’s awful. Everything web-based is slower on my 4.5 ghz MacBook Pro than things were on my 300 MHz PII running Windows 98. Every web page causes MacOS to complain “Safari is using a lot of power.” I was hunting for a project management web app, and one ate up 10% of the CPU just sitting there doing nothing. This has gotten particularly bad with Microsoft, with Word and Outlook on the Mac, which just kill battery life. (I think they’re using more and more JS under the hood, and I hear Outlook is slated to be replaced with a web app.) Teams is a bloated pig.
The crazy thing is that all these web apps also do a fraction of the things that the native apps used to do. They’ve somehow managed to strip down all the features while making the apps slow and bloated. Watching Microsoft’s To-Do blog is comitragic. Elon Musk will be living on Mars before the Microsoft tools allow you to schedule todos by dragging them to the calendar like Outlook has done since what, 98? (You can drag a todo from the web sidebar to the calendar now—but it somehow doesn’t actually schedule the due or start date in the todo itself or even have any link back to the todo.) And I feel like that’s one thing that’s different now. I also complained that Word 97 was a slow bloated big compared to Word Perfect, etc. But back in the day there was feature bloat. Now, everything is both slow and and non-functional.
I have to assume that it’s a structural thing with the industry. Machine learning, big data, security, etc., has become the hot areas, so all the “A” teams have migrated over there. I hear Apple is having trouble even getting people to do kernel work on MacOS.
I'm convinced my retirement gig will be writing nice, native apps for my platform of choice.
They won't bring in a ton of cash, but I can continue to make beautiful apps that are fast, focused, and respect the user's time and computing resources.
I just made one of these! I learned Swift to build it. Fast, focused, uses as little memory and CPU as I can manage for a (lightweight) video editor.
It's been fun to work a bit closer to the metal than I've been with JS for the last few years. Made about 50 sales so far. Can't imagine it'll make me rich but maaan it makes my video editing way faster :D
Your app seams great from what you have on its webpage. But the webpage made my AMD Threadripper based tower spin up the fan like hell broke loose. Closing the tab in Firefox immediately stopped the noise.
Thats why I designed a Haiku native video editor with over 30 effects that does 4K UHD video, 3D extruded fonts, GLSL pluggins, and the package is 1.2Mb in size (Medo for Haiku OS)
If I had to pick right now, I'd choose macOS for a platform.
For tech, I'd consider both Cocoa + Swift and SwiftUI as candidates for UI components, on a case-by-case basis. Swift is not my favorite language (feels like I have to use Xcode; have yet to try out the JetBrains IDE), but it gets the results I want. Perhaps in the future, we can use Rust in a more ergonomic fashion to talk with native UIs.
Honestly, I'd love an ObjC-like language that interops with ObjC and has strong static typing with a dynamic typing escape hatch for metaprogramming.
The JetBrains IDE for it (AppCode) is pretty nice, but you have to use Xcode for storyboards and UI design; other than that, light years ahead of the Xcode experience.
My uninvited suggestion: take a look at the FOX Toolkit. A truly lightweight non-themeable GUI toolkit written in C++, for Windows and Unix/X11. It's actively updated, but it's essentially a one man operation these days.
I can confirm it compiles with the latest Visual Studio and runs fine on Windows 10 in both 32-bit and 64-bit. (Well it did last time I checked, haven't tried the very latest release.) You're right the screenshots are ancient, but the code itself is still being updated by the project's maintainer Jeroen.
The FOX codebase isn't terribly modern, as it's older than the standard C++ concurrency machinery, but it works.
It does look dated, but I use it daily (I use the xfe file manager) and it is bloody quick - every action is almost instantaneous compare to the KDE, gnome, mate or cinnamon file managers.
It depends on the target market for your application I suppose - if your target won't be happy unless they have html/CSS or similar animations, then using something with low latency isn't going to make them happy.
Personally I don't mind the Windows 98 look, it strikes me as clean and no-nonsense. Everything is clear and high-contrast. Unlike with many 'flat' themes, it's generally clear what's clickable. I realise not everyone likes the Windows 98 look though.
If someone is serious about developing fast GUI apps, trading off on themeability is the kind of thing they should consider. As you say, FOX really is fast. I presume this is because of its uncompromising hard-coded native-code-only approach - it's just a C++ codebase. All the drawing operations are implemented directly in C++. Unlike Qt, there's no JavaScript. Unlike JavaFX, there's no CSS. It's all just C++.
Perhaps a GUI toolkit could add themeability without any performance impact by implementing it as a compile-time abstraction.
> depends on the target market for your application I suppose - if your target won't be happy unless they have html/CSS or similar animations, then using something with low latency isn't going to make them happy
Right, but mattgreenrocks said fast, focused, and respect the user's time and computing resources, presumably in contrast to current norms.
OUTLOOK! Jeez has it gotten slow on my mac. I am not a particularly fast typist, but I can routinely out-type outlook by a whole sentence. Moreover in the latest version, if I hit command-R and start typing it will routinely take so long to just start replying to a message that it will drop the first 90 characters I type. I've seen rumors that microsoft will replace it, and I cannot wait until that happens.
Outlook as a native application on Windows 10 on a recent Dell laptop is so slow that I have deleted the wrong e-mail in my inbox because I'll hit the trashcan icon and by the time Outlook notices, it's added new messages, moved things around, and then think that I clicked the icon on the message that now appears where the original did.
This is a major problem with Outlook now. I’ve done it several times, where Outlook is thinking and moving stuff around between when I target the thing I want to hit and when I move the mouse.
I remember Outlook on windows 10 actually adding animation to my typing to smooth out the flow of words. I disabled that immediately and I’m usually pro eye candy, but that was a step too far.
Glad I'm not the only one experiencing this. I have a brand new i7 Mac and outlook is laggy just switching between emails or inboxes.
Also, if I click the "Switch to New Outlook" button, it says that it can't copy over my custom IMAP accounts for work. I would think that supporting things besides exchange or gmail accounts would be something they would do before releasing a new version.
Weirdly enough it seems like Outlook on the web is somehow faster than the Windows version. It might be because lots of email uses HTML and Outlook is using an ancient version of HTML. I am very impressed with developers who can make things consistent in Outlook as well as actual browsers.
Outlook web is slow as molasses. In the desktop is literally unusable for me (It never opens my account). Both things were superior experiences in 1999.
Outlook on the web seems to be getting most of the development effort, in part because supposedly its parts are increasingly shared with Windows Mail/Calendar (aka "Mobile Outlook") through supposedly React Native, but also in part because apparently that's just where most users use Outlook in 2021 (even in many MS365 shops, supposedly, there are a bunch of companies that prefer the web app).
There have been a bunch of interesting rumors that Microsoft is planning to hollow out the insides of Outlook Desktop (anything that isn't nailed down to big corporate contracts and their extensions), and directly replace those guts with Web Outlook via React Native or something like it.
I think at this point they could hollow out Outlook and replace it with a guy who draws the interface on a whiteboard and then sends me a photo of it. That might have similar round-trip latency. /s
Really, a web app wrapped in a desktop app would be fine if it could perform better. I don't even need good, just better.
This is a specific nickpick but you won’t make me miss Outlook desktop. It’s crazy old and big, and for basic email stuff, its web app counterpart is much faster.
But anyway in the enterprise sector, it doesn’t matter whether an app is web or native, it will be slow regardless lol.
And just to confirm the forces in play here: enterprises care primarily about business outcomes of software, license cost, and support risk, with end-user experience being very far down the priority list except for a very few productivity applications where UI responsiveness actually matters for increasing employee output (fewer than you’d think). In short, the users aren’t the customers.
Yup. That's exactly why enterprise software almost universally sucks.
This could really be applied to any good or service where the purchaser is not the end user. For example, in the U.S. dealing with your health insurance company is a nightmare, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's your employer who's the customer. If the health insurance company treats you badly, you can't go with another provider, so they're free to offer terrible service so long as they don't piss of your company's HR department who decides which health plans to go with.
> ...except for a very few productivity applications where UI responsiveness actually matters for increasing employee output (fewer than you’d think).
If there is UI, UI responsiveness matters for employee output.
Research that has been done on this topic suggests that increase in UI latency non-linearly decreases user productivity, whith the ultimate effect on the cost of doing business.
And that has been known for decades - take a look at the "The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time" from 1982:
I have no good theory about why that is except that maybe more and more business people are under the illusion that "software is being increasingly commoditized" which is of course not true.
> ..."software is being increasingly commoditized"...
I only wish this were true; then value propositions for software could climb a value ladder. The challenge is business' are not standardized beyond some very basic functions, and new standardization comes at a brutally high cost (time and expense). So I see where office productivity has settled on Microsoft Office (though even there, I see huge fragmentation between versions, how people don't use styles, how most people have no idea of pivot tables in Excel, etc.), and we've pretty much just crawled along at a snails pace since then.
If anything, judging by how little I can transplant of business processes that emerge around software from one company to another, and how much those processes mutate over time, I would assert software standardization is getting worse, because getting businesses to standardize even when moving to the cloud has been a bigger challenge than I anticipated.
Is it possible to use the web only as a platform to deliver the newest version of your native application?
- User visits website
- downloads binary (preferably small size, use an appropriate language and cross-platform graphics library)
- launches it (preferably without installation)
- Perhaps creation of a local storage directory on the file system is needed the first time.
- and voilà!
What would be the main obstacles to such a workflow? Are there projects who try work like this?
It is awful, but there are some positive tradeoffs like security and flexibility. For example, there have been a zillion vulnerabilities with native Office over the years. Visual Studio is a terrible pain to skin or customize its look and feel compared to VS Code.
The crazy thing is that all these web apps also do a fraction of the things that the native apps used to do. They’ve somehow managed to strip down all the features while making the apps slow and bloated. Watching Microsoft’s To-Do blog is comitragic. Elon Musk will be living on Mars before the Microsoft tools allow you to schedule todos by dragging them to the calendar like Outlook has done since what, 98? (You can drag a todo from the web sidebar to the calendar now—but it somehow doesn’t actually schedule the due or start date in the todo itself or even have any link back to the todo.) And I feel like that’s one thing that’s different now. I also complained that Word 97 was a slow bloated big compared to Word Perfect, etc. But back in the day there was feature bloat. Now, everything is both slow and and non-functional.
I have to assume that it’s a structural thing with the industry. Machine learning, big data, security, etc., has become the hot areas, so all the “A” teams have migrated over there. I hear Apple is having trouble even getting people to do kernel work on MacOS.