Our great sponsors
-
-
Avalonia
Develop Desktop, Embedded, Mobile and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. The most popular .NET Foundation community project.
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
-
MuseScore
MuseScore is an open source and free music notation software. For support, contribution, bug reports, visit MuseScore.org. Fork and make pull requests!
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
I was wonder why aren't devs making desktop apps any more, especially since everyone is buying laptops and desktops again? With all the tooling out there for cross platform, a native experience, and better privacy/security than a webapp.
For example, Here are just two frameworks/tool kits that are easy to use and to build desktop apps with.
React Native for Windows and MacOS: https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/
Avalonia UI:
http://avaloniaui.net/
Also, If they do use frameworks like the ones mentioned above they will still only release the app for mobile and then rebuild the code for a webapp which is slower and does not have the functionality.
John
I just founded a company where we're building a cross-platform native desktop app. Perhaps given we're on HN we can scope this to ask why aren't any _startups_ building native desktop apps?
It's something I wonder about as well. We're building real-time performance critical software, so we don't have much of an alternative. Given these constraints, we also ruled out Electron, Avalonia, React Native early on.
We're using Qt Quick which doesn't get nearly the love it should. I was a web developer for 5 years in a past life, and I'm pretty blown away by how pleasant and well-designed Qt Quick's QML language is. One of our team members created Canonic, https://www.canonic.com to explore how the web might look if QML was used as the document markup for the web.
The popular opinion around Qt Quick is that it is best suited for mobile or embedded projects with a dynamic UI, animations, etc. But over the last few years, it has really become a great desktop solution – to the point where Qt put Widgets into maintenance mode and is focusing efforts on Qt Quick across desktop, mobile and embedded targets.
With Qt 6, the GUI is drawn using native graphics acceleration: Metal on macOS, DirectX11 on Windows, Vulkan on Linux. This makes it really easy to bring in a texture you're drawing in some other piece of code outside of Qt. As a result, the QtMultimedia framework in Qt6 is zero-copy on most platforms with the FFmpeg backend. Frames get decoded if a GPU HW decoder is available, then this texture can be read directly by QtQuick and then rendered by the display server without ever being copied. I don't think there's a single other cross platform framework out there that achieves the same level of usability, performance and easy access to platform native APIs.
Here are just a few non-trivial desktop apps that come to mind using Qt Quick:
- Denon Engine DJ - https://enginedj.com/
- MuseScore 4 - https://musescore.org
I definitely see Qt and Qt Quick technologies as a competitive advantage for us. We can develop the frontend quickly with QML / Javascript. We get full graphics accelerated GUI performance. Our app running under an average use-case idles at 100MB of RAM, which is basically equivalent to what a running instance of Finder on macOS uses. A full 1/5 of what Discord, Slack, Steam, etc use.
If you want to build real-time, high performance, native desktop apps, we're hiring. Email in profile.
Just wanted to say that I love MacUpdater! It’s focus on usability and getting the app to function with so many types of updaters is what makes it a “classic macOS app” that is always a must-have for me.
I work exclusively on desktop apps nowadays, creating https://lowtechguys.com and https://lunar.fyi and I can say there are a few very annoying issues with this desktop ecosystem.
1. Auto-updating
* Quick access, i.e. can live in the menubar/tray or can be assigned to a global keyboard shortcut which pops up the app quickly.
But... Electron can provide all of that! So, it's mighty tempting to start with a web app and then pepper in some desktop functionality later by wrapping your web app using Electron.
* Disclaimer: I'm working on this problem with ToDesktop [2] so factor my bias into your comments. :)
[0] https://notion.so/
Yes it's possible for web apps to integrate things like FullStory that let devs monitor people like a citizen of Zalem. But Electron apps do that too. For instance someone posted a show hn thread a few months ago of a terminal gui they built that had fullstory integrated. The author was like mea culpa and removed it, since all he probably wanted to do was fix bugs. But my point is that everything creepy browsers are able to do, local apps can now do too -- and then some.
The question people always ask is how can we build a technology that makes being evil impossible? And that's the wrong question to be asking, because it's a people problem, not a technology problem. What we need is transparency. The ability to monitor the people who are monitoring us. If you can empirically see what a local app is actually doing, then you can say for certain that it's more trustworthy than anything else. So how do we do that?
How do we do that? Well, for starters, here's a 1KLOC tutorial (similar to Antirez's Kilo editor or Linenoise) on how to build your own version of the `strace` command in pure C. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/tool/build/... If you monitor the system interfaces then you don't need to read the source code. It's analogous to watching someone's behavior, rather than reading that person's DNA, in order to figure out if they're good or evil.
Another good tool that might help you secure your digital spaces is Blinkenlights. Right now it only supports static binaries, but if you have one of those and you want to learn more about how it works, then you can watch what it does with memory in real time. https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/
This is the same philosophy behind Chrome's incredible debugger GUI (which is something that sadly local electron-like apps have the power to take away) because transparency is the bedrock of trust. It's always surprised me that more people haven't been focusing on building tools like this. It also makes me sad when certain open source apps (which shall remain nameless because I don't want to be flamed) go out of their way to make strace output incomprehensible.