Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

I'm not the biggest fan of this sed reinvention of PostScript we call the browser stack, but my main problem with Electron and the like isn't this, but their design target: Making desktop apps look and feel like web apps.

We're throwing away all kinds of HIG achievements since 1984, for the sake of pretty colors and superfluous transitions. Not too long ago, a considerable effort was spent to make web apps behave like desktop apps, now the inverse is true.

I blame the rise of "UX", just like "DevOps" is too blame for needless infrastructure.

View on HN

You just dropped that comment about UX in at the end, but I think I know what you're hinting at.

What I see from UX/UI people is that consistency means an app has the same look and feel across OS platforms and the web, and it matches the corporate house style/identity.

The idea that apps should be consistent with the platform they are running on is completely dead. Even the OS platforms themselves don't have a consistent look and feel in any given version. Not to mention that that metaphorical fish has been flipped in the pan so many times that it has just disintegrated.

No one cares about consistency with OS platforms except us nerds on forums like this.

> I blame the rise of "UX", just like "DevOps" is too blame for needless infrastructure.

you can't just drop a sentence like that and not elaborate on it - unless you want to offend somebody.

Each resource hungry "DevOps" tool has its place and has its worth. They're just often misused. A small IT firm with <10 Hypervisors won't need openstack for example. Thats only worth its maintenance if you're working with tens or hundreds or hardware machines.

And a webapp which consists of <10 services probably doesn't need service discovery and advanced de-/commissioning of containers/vms. Administering hundreds of microservices without that is borderline impossible however.

DevOps as a practice isn't wrong, of course. Sysadmins scripted and programmed since the dawn of the silicon Pleistocene. But if every small company hires someone with that specific job description, well, you have to spend your 80+ startup hours somewhere.

  Making desktop apps look and feel like web apps.

This is a good point. However, it does seem like web and mobile apps and their ilk are the future for the bulk of software the majority of people use (excluding, let's say, "Pro" apps like photoshop, excel, dev tools). I'm not a huge fan of this, but the times have changed. I'm not sure that traditional desktop apps are really what I'd use the hypothetical framework I described to build.

Something like my business expense tracking app, though? If I wanted it to sync and be functionally identical to the app on my phone? I could see this framework being used for that.

UX is not some evil witchcraft, it is an accumulation of best practices that are not based on hunches that solo developers conjured up out of thin air, but resulted from measuring user feedback.

We used to call that "usability", and it was mostly done on the OS/API level (cf. Tog's work at Apple). In the web space, I see way too many individual practices (as what's "best" in the long run across all domains might not be the "best" at funnelling people through your web app).

Never mind that if it's your sole job, you have to demonstrate value and that often leads away from generic solutions.

But you cant solve this on OS level, really. People read New York Times differently when compared to how they shop and want to checkout.

People browse Stack Overflow and hacker news differently too. There is no set of rules that are generic AND usable in all these cases.

And you do not read a Medium.com article the same way you set something up with your goverment in a goverment website, browsing through hundreds of options.

But why bring this misery to desktop apps? A lot of this arose out of the lack of standards and (initial) widgets in a browser.

Not that I believe that the amount of different interaction patterns is justified on the web; the lack of almost any kind of standard widgets just made this a free-for-all bikeshedding design space. In the long run, I doubt that your measurably superior solution to editing an entry in a grid is better than using the same pattern in every data grid.

Quite often I'm reminded of readability tests using different fonts, where the one people liked best often wasn't the one with the best reading comprehension. If you're picking a font for your OS, there was little choice and the customer probably bought it already. On the web, they can go to <rival product #341> because that uses Helvetica Neue and not Akzidenz Grotesk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com