Comment by generalk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by generalk | Hacker News Reader

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  > The web sucks [...]

As much as I love and miss native interfaces -- old Win3.1 games that used actual windows for the UI, or newsgroup readers, or for that matter native email clients -- I gotta say, the web as an app platform means I can migrate off one platform and onto another and know my basic needs are met.

The web as an app-delivery platform is amazing. I don't miss documents that only open in WordPerfect 5.1, or having to UUCP files around, or being forced to write non-platform-specific software once for Windows, once for Mac, maybe once for Unix, and hell with anything else.

To the point of TFA, the desktop as a concept is well past its expiration date. Apple ships amazing phones and tablets that are touch-based, and is migrating their touch-based UX to MacOS, but for some damn reason refuses to ship touchscreens, which is just bonkers. We're halfway between paradigms right now, so it's rough going sometimes, but I'm hopeful we'll get somewhere great.

> migrating their touch-based UX to MacOS, but for some damn reason refuses to ship touchscreens, which is just bonkers

Touch based computing doesn't scale to larger devices very well.

It works well on phones since our fingers are just doing small movements, but on larger devices, users get "gorilla arms" when using large touch screen devices while having to hold their arms in the air.

Gorilla arms are definitely a thing, and purely touch-based UIs on the vertical monitors we have now don't work very well and will never become popular.

However, I had a touchscreen XPS 13 a while back. And being able to tap the occasional button or slider was _super_ helpful. Certainly more helpful and less jarring than the touch bar my Macbook has.

And consider things like the Microsoft Surface Studio, a desktop PC with a touch display designed to angle at a position that would be more usable with a pen or touch controls for longer periods of time.

We're getting there.

I think open standards address your issue just as effectively. You mentioned newsgroup readers and mail user agents, for example.

The web apps that I enjoy using are the ones that enable real-time collaboration. I think that's where the web app wins out over native. But the vast majority of things we do online are nothing to do with that.

I reckon I skip 80% of the links I engage with here because I'm immediately presented with a GDPR dialogue, or because the website won't load because it relies on some external domain that I've blocked.

As for iOS and macOS, I really don't think they're serious productivity platforms. I've migrated everything that matters to me to Linux, and when my iPhone finally dies, I'll move over to a Linux phone as well.

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