Hacker News Reader

Desktop apps today are just such a huge regression compared to the past. I was recently looking at software for PDF reading and note taking. I tried all these Electron apps that ran like crap and made the fans spin up on my 2020 MacBook Pro with 32GB. Meanwhile they have far fewer features than a 1990s shareware app. I used Scrivener for a bit but it’s pretty crap about sync so I switched to Emacs with org and pdf-tools. It’s a total hack of elisp and C but it’s vastly more functional than any of the $10/month SaaS note taking platforms out there. Do you remember the essay “worse is better?” Web apps are a manifestation of that.

Anyone who’s tried to learn native app development, especially on Mac or iOS, will know that it’s a massive pain in the backside. Documentation is sparse, located in exactly one place, not readable on mobile (!!! the ultimate in irony), formerly available but now deleted, or only available in live video presentation format. I blame the OS vendors as much as anyone.

Native iOS dev is pretty easy to get started on these days, there's loads of material for both UIKit and SwiftUI. From my view it's easier than getting started on native Android dev by a good measure.

Native Mac dev on the other hand is another matter. The situation has improved some since then, but it's not too different from when I picked up Objective-C + Cocoa/AppKit back in the early-mid 00s, where nearly all instructional material came in the form of print or random tidbits scattered across various developer blogs.

I'll mostly +1 this as someone who got into iOS dev and went straight to SwiftUI for the past 2 months.

There are some individual doc pages that seem to be auto-generated and a bit sparse when it comes to useful context.

For instance, sometimes X object cannot be instantiated on its own according to its relevant doc and you need to use Y internal API that provides it instead. However, there's no explanation as to why or what can be done instead, which doesn't help someone who's very new to the architecture and frameworks.

I had to go bug people I knew who had worked on QuickTime frameworks BITD to get anything done when I worked at Apple the first time, in 2004. It's not and never has been simply an external problem.

Well, nothing now is as confusing as QuickTime 7. I don't think it's possible to write something against that without bugs even if you have the source.

This is very true.

All three of those are orders of magnitude harder to learn than web technologies, which have been backwards compatible for something like the past 2 or 3 decades and see little churn in the APIs. Not saying it’s better, but it is a lot easier to learn, so the vendors need to work a lot harder if they want to compete, which they don’t do, which is why Electron is so popular.

>(!!! the ultimate in irony)

It's not like people are developing using their mobile device. I'm sure the online docs are assumed to be read by people on a non-mobile device. I can't imagine trying to read docs on mobile while banging out code on a laptop. Seems pointless, especially if the docs have links for downloading something or what not.

It’s only pointless if you don’t believe the iPhone is a revolutionary communication tool that changes how we interact with the Internet, which seems like a strange position to be held by someone on the iOS team.

It’s really some of the only documentation I’ve come across that can’t be read on mobile, and it’s all because of a sidebar which isn’t even a good reason.

I don't care how revolutionary one may or may not think it, but it is an extremely horrible tool for a developer actively working on a project and referencing the docs.

Interesting, the linux desktop landscape has moved on the opposite direction. Still has a long way to go but has been improving consistently. I often see windows users using aberrations to read PDF's with ads and trying to persuade the user to join an online service like foxit or adobe. On linux, evince has gained very discrete features over the years but works very very well, actually better than before; it probably eats a bit more memory because of the newest libs. Okular is on the same direction but is more feature rich, not surprising considering the KDE heritage.

The pdf reader scenario is just one of many cases the desktop on other OS's became a vector to spread ads while the linux has only improved over time. Considering the popularity of android, it has the same problems as windows in terms of apps being just a way to spreads ads; fortunately f-droid saves me from these.

So, I hope things will continue to improve on the FLOSS desktop. Hope it brings more users too.

With regard to the electron apps... With 4 cores and 8GB of RAM, I really don't care that much about the performance loss. It feels a bit inconsistent sometimes, but I like to know that I'm using the same app as my colleagues on other OS's.

Yeah, the latest Fedora is getting pretty nice between Gnome and Wayland.

What’s shocking to me is how bad first party software is getting. Acrobat DC kills the battery on my MBP doing, among other things, constantly running some cloud updater thing. It’s worse at browsing PDFs than a decade ago. Same thing for Outlook. They’ve started integrating a bunch of web technologies into it. It actually has less features now than before (tasks and notes redirect you to the website).

And I don’t just mean that the latest version is slower on older hardware. It’s vastly slower on current hardware than the old versions were on the hardware that was contemporary at the time. My work machine is a ThinkPad i7 that boosts to 4.2 GHz. Just hitting Win-Right to snap Outlook to one half of the screen causes it to visibly spasm.

does linux have a reasonable replacement for xfig yet?

Last time I tried xfig was more than a decade ago. I don't do much technical drawing, my needs have been fully covered by Inkscape.

Just apt-get installed xfig. Still works pretty well.

Can use Sumatra PDF on Windows.

For PDF reading, at least, I always found Skim the best.

for pdf reader, Skim is a nice light weight app for macOS.

https://skim-app.sourceforge.io/

(For Windows there is SumatraPDF: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader)

To replace Evernote I'm actually really happy with Apple's own Notes app. It's native, it syncs with iCloud, you can read your notes on the web, it supports rich text, per-note encryption, checklists, and multiple folders.

It's good.

Utterly useless if you gotta collaborate with someone on a Windows machine, though. :)

1password was an amazing app and now it's an electron app that frequently doesn't work for me, if you want another example.

It also runs on Linux and Windows now with only a single codebase. They're not doing this for no reason; it may well just not make economic sense to develop native Mac apps anymore.

As they grow into corporate windows focused someone else can come and make a dedicated non-cloud Mac app.

Call it 2factorpass or soemthing.

Apple has been busy improving the functionality of iCloud Keychain, including stuff like adding a better UI than Keychain Access, compromised password alerts, 2FA token support, etc.

At some point I should really revisit and see how good it’s gotten.

That's the key problem, the conflict of interest as separate native apps are much better for users but a single cross-platform app (often web/Electron based) is much better for the developer due to cost, compatibility and maintenance issues.

So the endgame is probably resigning to having lousy non-native software until/unless there once more comes a time with a single dominant/monopoly platform where people just make a single native app for everyone.

That's the problem from your point of view. For me, a lousy cross-platform app is a direct upgrade from "no app at all", so I don't anticipate that very many software engineers are going to spend their time designing a bespoke version of their app for >20% of their target audience, even if the experience on that one platform is better. If we lived in a perfect world, every app would have a Qt, GTK3, GTK4, SwiftUI, Winforms and Fluent Xaml version that makes everyone happy. Somewhere you've got to draw the line though.

Meaning that Linux is nowadays not just continuing to have low UX standards, but is dragging down standards across the all OSes :)

Linux has native GUI toolkits. If those lazy developers didn't just sit around all day developing Electron clients that worked, we could have a SwiftUI, Catalyst, WinForms, GTK and Qt version that everyone can hate! What a waste of developer resources, amirite?

I've had a totally different experience as a Linux 1password user.

I went from a shitty cli and a laggy browser extension to an excellent native feeling 1password app that is fully integrated into my desktop environment. I don't notice any lag, in fact it feels snappier than the native windows version on my handful of years older laptop.

Unlike many other apps I use (Spotify, vscode, intellij, Firefox) I don't notice any difference in system load when it's running too.

Gee, how was I able to do the same before Electron happened.

Apple decided to deprecate Objective-C and AppKit. The Web is far more stable than native UX widgets, breaks less often nowadays and has a larger pool of developers so its Electron all the way for everyone.

Neither of these things are actually deprecated; both remain far more stable than any web framework.

And deprecating is not the same thing as breaking or removing. It does signal the preparation to remove. However, Objective-C (last I checked) still works very well.

Furthermore... how would one even remove Objective-C? It's the glue that holds everything together in macOS[0]; removing it would be like removing COM from Windows. Apple would need to rewrite all of their public frameworks in Swift and remove the Objective-C bridges... and, at that point, why stop at just removing Objective-C? Why not kill AppKit while we're at it and make UIKit the only way to present a window[1] to the display? At that point, nobody is going to bother rewriting their apps[2], and the Mac loses all it's developer support.

[0] And, for that matter, most of their other operating systems.

[1] WindowScene, technically

[2] Astute fans of macOS history might remember this sounding quite familiar. When Steve Jobs bought Apple with Apple's money, he wanted to basically continue NeXT as it was (even the Windows NT port) and replace System 7 entirely with lightly-rebranded OPENSTEP 5 and a VM (dubbed the "penalty box"). This failed so dramatically the whole project was cancelled/rebranded as "OSX Server", and Apple announced Carbon to provide Classic APIs with minimal changes on OSX.

Furthermore, like COM is pretty much alive (thanks WinDev), some newer Apple frameworks like Metal are actually written in Objective-C (with C++ for the shaders), Swift API for Metal are just bindings.

Regarding point 2, that was thanks to Adobe and Microsoft pressure to keep targeting Mac platforms. Sean Parent from Adobe / C++ fame was a key person in this process.

Also, as much as Apple gets a rep for putting developers on an upgrade treadmill and breaking old apps, they actually aren't the worst offenders. Their internal rule is "don't break existing APIs without a good reason", and that's something they learned from the Rhapsody dustup[0]. You can contrast this with Microsoft and Google, who follow opposing philosophies:

- Microsoft: Don't break existing APIs, period. If the existing one can't be extended, write an entirely new system to replace it (e.g. XAML, UWP XAML) and leave the old system in the OS forever.

- Google[1]: Don't complicate your code with backwards compatibility. If some change would make the code better, scan the entire Google monorepo and recompile the world against your new version, and then tell our AppEngine customers they have about a week to transition.

[0] Carbon wasn't deprecated until 64-bit Intel support happened, and was only removed alongside 32-bit Intel support. A Carbon universal binary can target a disturbingly large range of macOS versions - basically Mac OS 8 up until macOS Catalina.

[1] Mercifully, the Chromium and Android teams actually don't buy into this.

Well, the documentation for Objective-C/C++ has mostly been removed. It's all Swift based how-tos, videos and learning material. You have to hunt Google for getting anything. You get better material for Objective-C/C++ on the LLVM home page. Most of the old Objective-C links are dead.

Perhaps I should have said feature frozen on-the-way to deprecation instead. All new development in lang/ux is happening in Swift/SwiftUI.

https://medium.com/geekculture/swift-5-uikit-is-dying-14b475...

https://medium.com/geekculture/swift-5-uikit-is-dying-part-2...

Not only did they not deprecate them, Metal is actually written in a mix of Objective-C and C++.

Also at WWDC 2021 there were a few Objective-C talks.

> Apple decided to deprecate Objective-C and AppKit.

> The Web is far more stable than native UX widgets, breaks less often nowadays

I got a good laugh on those fibs.

Objective-C isn't going anywhere, and AppKit has been mostly unchanged for longer than nearly any front-end framework you can name has existed.

I was really loving Scrivener, then I switched to windows and found out I had to buy a new license to use it on windows, back to just simple text files i guess

If you’re ok with something a little more barebones, I highly recommend Bear App. Been using it for years. It’s super minimal, while at the same time allowing you to achieve everything you need to do. One of those tools that just gets out of the way and you never fuss with it. Also great performance and you can sync it across devices seamlessly.

Last I checked it looked nice but it failed the “collaborate with Windows/Android friends” requirement. Has that changed?

There is still Evernote Legacy, which is the native Evernote prior to the upgraded nightmare version. I have no idea how long they’ll keep it around, but it’s out there.

No Evernote Legacy option for my phone and tablet, though. And that renders it pretty much useless.

Would developers stick to dedicating time for macos if apple took a smaller chunk?

Apple takes 0% of your Mac app sales, because virtually nobody distributes on the App Store.