Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

The web already won.

When was the last time someone told you about an app idea and you had any vision of a Win32 (or WPF) app? The web is the defacto app platform for desktop today. Sure, there are some legacy and niche apps that are native on desktop, but mostly everything new is web based on desktop.

Mobile is a different story, but I think its due mostly to the fact that mobile HW is still changing rapidly. New sensors and other capabilities to tap into, where a standards web has to catch up. But I think this gap too will go away as mobile HW matures.

View on HN

When was the last time someone told you about an app idea and you had any vision of a Win32 (or WPF) app?

What does a specific widget toolkit have to do with native applications in general?

Sure, there are some legacy and niche apps that are native on desktop

People still use office suites, raster and vector graphics editors, CAD, 3D modelers, meshing and texturing tools, media players, P2P clients, text editors, various format readers and writers, etc. that are largely dominated by native.

Even most non-HTTP network clients (like IRC and FTP) are still predominantly used as native apps because of the far superior experience they bring.

You went on to list a bunch of niche app classes except for two:

1) Office suites --> Largely a legacy app suite... and web use is increasing for both Office and due to Google Apps.

2) Media Players -- Playing local media is done by native apps, but that is becoming an increasing niche scenario. I posit that Netflix, Pandora, and YouTube dominate other media players.

The most important native app that most people use is their web browser. :-)

I'm sorry to say, but your definitions of "niche" and "legacy" are extremely heterodox and I can't have much of an argument under these semantic constraints.

By legacy I suspect it is meant that the category is finalized in its current form. All major new software will be web-based, and the only desktop software being made going forwards is the one which was already being made. Office and photoshop aren't goin anywhere soon, but the competitor that replaces them will be web-based.

Not that I think it's particularly true. I think the desktop form factor is going away, but what replaces it is not so much web as it is responsive / adaptive, and web is a subcategory of that, with mobile being another. Having a UI which is only usable through keyboard and mouse sitting behind a desk just doesn't cut it anymore.

I think text editors should be included. I switched from Textmate to Atom and have not looked back. For everyday tasks I cant tell the difference performance wise.

If someone tells me about an "app idea" without specifying platform I assume a mobile-native app. I do not think I am in the minority in this.

Yeah? Spotify, Skype, Google Earth, any developer tool, iTunes, Sonos, Keynote, MS Office, Photoshop, any video game ..... there are plenty of popular native desktop apps out there. I'd say there'd be more too, if the industry made them more frequently. But all we churn out are web apps these days - not because that's what users demand but for all sorts of other reasons.

"Native desktop" spotify is just a web app wrapped into an embedded Chromium browser.

"just" a browser with a lot of native technology baked in to enhance the experience. Playlist caching for one.

localStorage.getItem("myPlaylist")

I'm not saying that's what they use, it could be WebSQL, IndexedDB, FileAPI - local data storage is built into your browser.

The last time is probably Photos for OS X (though of course that's not Win32). I doubt that a web app can manage the same number of photos as well.

I think the biggest change is that people have mostly stopped paying for desktop apps, outside of professional tools. I have yet to buy a program written in HTML and JavaScript, though I have paid for content and services provided through such apps.

Yep. The Firefox version of Photoshop really cuts it. Not to mention the 3dsMax one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com