Comment by electroly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by electroly | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a Windows developer and as such I'm biased, but I think Windows apps are dramatically easier to write than web apps. I still use WinForms professionally to this day. Productivity is absurdly high. The number of concerns to worry about is low. The framework has been stable for 20 years and I know all of its quirks, which never change. Fads are ignored. We can zip around with amazing speed.

On the other hand, our apps are:

- Ugly looking

- Dated looking (this is different than ugly, but our apps are both)

- Full of UI jank (too many WinForms controls take their sweet time painting on the UI thread)

- Non-server-based

- Non-cross-platform

- Non-sandboxed

- Installed from downloaded file that gives scary warnings in your browser when you try to open it

These downsides hint at some of the reasons why I think web-based development is necessarily more involved than for Windows apps.

A large part of the reason people ignore your model for business use, where the target platform is locked down to a single target, is the perceived need to run their software on any given piece of hardware.

That's a question that really aught to be answered. If the business application only requires Windows PCs as a target your design wins out despite the perceived shortcomings.

>I'm a Windows developer and as such I'm biased, but I think Windows apps are dramatically easier to write than web apps.

I agree that the developer-facing usability of a good desktop GUI toolkit runs circles around whatever webdev is these days, but the barrier to entry for a completely new programmer is certainly a lot higher than HTML.

That's why I miss good ol' VB6.

Spaghetti code? Yeah, not only that, but the whole pasta menu. On Error Resume Next.

The barrier to entry were none to zero.

Would solving these painpoints be a market? Sounds interesting to delve into.

Most of them can be solved by using a more modern but similar toolkit like Jetpack Compose, JavaFX etc. Then you have distribution, but to get rid of the scary warnings just requires you buy signing certificates. Distribution is still a pain after that, but that's why I built Conveyor, to simplify it.

Going further would require remixing bits of Chromium to create a browser-like thing with a sandbox, but which is much less opinionated about what runs inside of it.

Problem is, for there to be a market requires that devs (or someone) pays for it. How much would you pay to be able to not write a web app?

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