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Comment by zenocon | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to take a wild stab at the primary reason he develops on the Mac is his own comfort and expertise with it - which is fine, of course. With the advancements made in web tech today, I don't think all the performance reasons he listed ring entirely true. See for example Google Refine https://code.google.com/p/google-refine/ which is a similar tool to his Wizard tool, with a web front-end.

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  > his own comfort and expertise with it - which is fine, of
  > course. With the advancements made in web tech today

Do you have any expertise developing for desktop/native mobile? I have a lot of expertise developing for the web—I've spent 4x as much being the web developer before switching to iOS programming full-time and every time I see someone presenting web tech as a superior way to build apps I have a hard time taking this seriously. If there is a lack of expertise it must be the other way: web devs don't know what native frameworks offer. Sure we can push and twist and stretch a systems with foundations met for the marking-up document structure and styling document presentation to fit the needs for the up, but what's really the point? Yes there is the promise of develop once run on every platform, which in practice is more like develop core once, endlessly tweak for idiosyncrasies later. And when the web tech really works for mobile app it usually just means that your app had to be a web page anyway.

You've mis-read my statement as some sort of attack on native development and counter-attacked accordingly - even personally? I never said web tech was superior. I'm simply presenting a counter-argument to those that continue to deride web development and claim it can't hold a candle to native apps. There are endless examples of web applications done right that have compelling experiences and perform on par with native apps. I've provided a couple of examples in this thread, but there are countless others. I'm simply claiming web apps can be done right.

You gave a very cavalier response.

> I'm going to take a wild stab at the primary reason he develops on the Mac is his own comfort and expertise with it (...)

This to me reads as "I'm not going to put much thought into this, but it sounds like he is just ignorant."

Maybe you didn't intend it that way, but that's how it read to me.

At the risk of sounding cavalier :) see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5659447 -- which is a better summary of the point I was trying to make. It seems he likes the Mac native platform, which is great, but don't try to sell me on the idea that all other platforms and the web, in particular fall short.

He's quite explicit in stating this his reasoning is for his specific problem.

No offense, but with that intro to your post and the way you follow it up, you strike me as exactly the person in question who has been out of the web dev game for a bit and doesn't know how much it's progressed in the last 3 years alone.

It's not hard to do responsive design. Yes, in iOS world you can still hard code 5 layouts if you want. Those of us that have also done Android design work understand why that's untenable moving forward. I'll take relative layouts, etc and be very happy with Bootstrap/Foundation.

This made me scratch my head. Desktop apps have been accommodating multiple screen and window sizes since before the Internet existed. Do you think we hard-code a separate layout for every window size?

I don't know if responsive design is "hard" or not, but I observe that on the web, fixed widths are still incredibly common, and even major sites break easily. I visit Google, and if my window size is not at least one thousand pixels, the Sign In button is clipped and not initially visible. This would simply be considered a bug in a desktop app.

Besides, I always thought that layout was one of the weakest parts of HTML and CSS - witness the endless parade of hacks to achieve equal height columns.

As someone who is not a "web designer", but occasionally have to knock up a page or two I agree with you all 100%. To me the whole CSS business is just a big hack, and not at all usable or intuitive. YMMV, but I think there's a reason why people come up with [1] type jokes...

[1] http://bethesignal.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/css-is-awe...

Wait, someone who doesn't use a technology full time doesn't understand it and thinks it's a hack? News at 11.

As someone who feels fairly proficient in CSS and also has experience with desktop application layout stuff (Swing, Qt, XAML mostly) I can say that CSS does feel like a hack. It was conceived as a (more or less) simple stylesheet language for (mostly) textual documents. By now it's used not only to style increasingly-complex document layouts but also application UIs and in that respect it definitely falls short of what other (widget-based) things could achieve for years.

It gets better with some of the CSS3 layouts which more closely mirror what's ben available in the desktop world for ages, but using those is just a recipe for »Your site looks like crap on my browser« mails because they're not standardised yet or not yet widely-implemented (or your target audience uses something else than the bleeding-edge version).

So the same coded version of Office works on your tablet and phone and the UI adapts properly? That's pretty impressive.

I wasn't implying desktop designers hard code everything -- but in fact many of them do or make assumptions that the app will NEVER be used on anything smaller than even the absurdly small 800x600. We're talking about mobile apps, responsiveness, the cost/benefit of targetting multiple devices with one app vs six native apps.

Neither Microsoft Office nor Google Docs "just worked" on tablets and phones without major reworking of their UIs. It's not obvious that the web has any advantage here - I just now visited docs.google.com and was encouraged to "download the Google Drive iOS app" so that I can "edit documents." (!)

If you target multiple platforms with one app, you get an app that works from OK to poorly on lots of platforms. Look at Light Table as an example: done entirely via web technologies, easy to port everywhere, but feels incredibly alien and _wrong_ on my Mac. (No offense Chris!)

Compare to Sublime Text 2, which to my understanding has lots of platform-specific code to make it feel native on each platform, but also a shared core (using Cairo, etc). So "six native apps" need not cost anywhere near six times a single native app.

So in the end, the cost of targeting multiple platforms with a single app is surely lower than targeting each platform individually, but that's just a classic cost/quality tradeoff - the web limits your polish. And what good is having your app on multiple platforms if it's inferior to native alternatives on all of them? I know as a Mac user, I'll pick the Mac app that feels like a Mac app every time.

> This made me scratch my head. Desktop apps have been accommodating multiple screen and window sizes since before the Internet existed. Do you think we hard-code a separate layout for every window size?

I think the problem is the youth of today doesn't know anything other than web development, so they are full of false assumptions.

Yeah, I personally have a giggle whenever i see a complaint about catering to multiple resolutions. I seem to remember devs having similar issues with desktop games (and apps) in the whole VGA -> SVGA -> XGA migration. (1987 to 1990 ish... My dates may be off). Were none of the lessons learned then applicable to mobile dev today?

What about the wonderful modes of Hercules, CGA and EGA? :)

Remember when those were the good options? :-)

Your comparison of Wizard with Refine is misguided. The two products do completely different things. Refine "refines" data into a usable form. Wizard is a stats and visualization tool for understanding an already-clean dataset. Last I checked, Refine actually runs a local web server, even if its client is in the browser, so it's not that different from a native app. Wizard also does incredible amounts of visualization that Refine doesn't do.

(disclaimer: I purchased Wizard a few months ago and have been exceptionally happy with it -- it's a brilliant product)

So, pair Refine with d3.js and you've got both. There's no reason I see to require native application for data visualization unless you absolutely need to load enormous amounts of data, but the value in the visualization itself tends to diminish the more datasets you shove in it. d3.js has very powerful visualization tools https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery. He chose to build is tool in the native Mac platform, which is great, and great to hear the product is really useful for you -- I'm just defending against alternative tech choices. If you wanted to build this in web tech, I think you surely could. I'm not saying it should be built in web tech, but I disagree with the notion that it couldn't be built in web tech.

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