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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

SMH that so many people think that the only ones who like information density and complex desktop apps are finance people.

What about store managers restocking product?

What about developers working on complicated projects?

What about data scientists staring at spreadsheets?

What about power users?

What about anyone with the kind of intelligence that doesn't shy away from large amounts of information?

Do most designers ever think about ANY of these people? Modern app design doesn't even TRY to throw any of these types a bone. No "Advanced >" menus anymore, no pages of options anymore, nothing. It's all just 'sit down, shut up, push the button like a good stupid little user so we can all get paid.'

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I think the OP's issue is custom-written enterprise application development though: I agree with your examples of spreadsheets and IDEs (I mentioned those above), but they're generic applications, and their development doesn't justify Microsoft investing in an entire stack.

If the UX and latency requirements can be met with a web app, it doesn't support WPF/.NET maintenance/enhancement.

Web apps can do density so long as the latency requirements aren't too tight. There's where the banking folks spend their IT money.

  they're generic applications, and their development
  doesn't justify Microsoft investing in an entire stack.

Seems to me there's one or two applications for every profession, and they probably mount up.

I mean, I'm sure if you look at the statistics only 0.1% of users use Photoshop, or Premiere Pro, or AutoCAD, or SolidWorks, or Altium, or Matlab, or whatever - but if you drop support for all of them, what are users going to do?

There are also new development fronts in specialist domains that are computationally intensive or a poor fit for web-apps.

Specifically, when WPF was launched all they could talk about were the cool 3D possibilities for doctors, researchers, and such... The reality has been less "Minority Report" than we had hoped, but those kinds of demands are growing, and very often will require the level of control over hardware that demands a desktop app.

In theory a lot of this is solvable with webapps, in practice there is a reason desktop computing environments exist :)

And no keyboard shortcuts!

In the past 30 seconds OP went down by two points. Downvoters... may I ask why?

MSFT got into the office.

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