Big list of webapps masquerading as native
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@twelvebaud said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@steve_the_cynic Yes! CtrlIns, ShiftIns, and ShiftDel the way
GodIBM intended! None of this "eks see vee" crud!No, that's not what I meant. I meant the special way that Excel does it. No matter how you activate "copy", it sets "I'm copying" mode, and you paste it repeatedly, as you'd sort of expect, until you start editing something, at which point the "I'm copying" mode disappears, and you can no longer paste the thing you wanted.
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@morowhat said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Don't you love it when a project contains absolutely nothing to say what it is or does?
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@jaloopa said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Don't you love it when a project contains absolutely nothing to say what it is or does?
Looks like a key-based method of secure exchange to me, based on this pic:
https://camo.githubusercontent.com/2697946420d1d0cec894c317ea55771e3a868b11/68747470733a2f2f6b6579626173652e696f2f696d616765732f6769746875622f7265706f5f73686172652e706e673f
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@jaloopa said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Don't you love it when a project contains absolutely nothing to say what it is or does?
They say:
Hi, and welcome to the Keybase client repo. All our client apps (macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android) are being actively developed in this repository. Please, dig around.
It does seem to be related to cryptography, but... did they really have to be this cryptic?
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@raceprouk said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@twelvebaud And it still works better than Steam :D
...except for roughly 50% of the time, when you try to download some game and it gets stuck at 4 KB/sec and nobody seems to have any real clue why. :(
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@adynathos said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
me switching between OSes is like you switching between VS and VS+ReSharper.
Imagine if you did the switch every day.I don't have to imagine, ReSharper getting its cache corrupted and crapping out is a daily occurrence to me.
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@masonwheeler said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
it gets stuck at 4 KB/sec and nobody seems to have any real clue why
See if there's an alternative to Milwaukee PC in your area
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@blakeyrat So I just found out that Microsoft Teams has this same bug but worse.
Discord, if its window ends up off-screen, won't let you right-click the window preview to bring it back on screen. But at least if you quit and restart it, it'll be on screen.
Microsoft Teams? Also won't let you right-click the window preview, but in its case it saves the wrong broken off-screen window position forever. The only way to get the window back on screen is to plug-in whatever monitor you unplugged then drag the window to the correct screen. Don't have that monitor anymore? You're fucked forever, fuck you users.
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@blakeyrat said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Don't have that monitor anymore? You're fucked forever, fuck you users.
Does + / + not bring the window into view?
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@raceprouk I don't know, my monitor's plugged in again and I'm too lazy to unplug it just to test that. But I will next time if I remember, which I won't.
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@raceprouk said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@blakeyrat said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Don't have that monitor anymore? You're fucked forever, fuck you users.
Does + / + not bring the window into view?
That's a nice trick, never thought about it, even if I snap windows using those shortcuts everyday. Probably doesn't work with dialogs though.
I used to do Win+Space, select Move with arrow keys, press an arrow key to start the move and then just position it with the mouse. Never got why if you start moving the mouse without pressing an arrow key first it gets cancelled.
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@zmaster Win+Shift+Arrow will move windows that can't snap.
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@lb_ said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@zmaster Win+Shift+Arrow will move windows that can't snap.
Just tried with some native apps - between a regular (100%) and 4k (200%) monitor. Don't do that. Totally fucks up the size.
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@lb_ said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@zmaster Win+Shift+Arrow will move windows that can't snap.
Whenever I play Minecraft, I always put it in windowed borderless and use that shortcut to fullscreen it. Makes it much smoother to tab out.
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@LB_ That's handy. Now I only need to remember it!
For anyone curious, here's the documentation. I wasn't expecting that many shortcuts :O
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and its fork
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Microsoft Teams
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It’s not quite as simple as just calling https://teams.microsoft.com when the application starts however. There is functionality to the application and buttons that don’t exist on the webpage. Plus, by packaging all the assets (all the images, the JS etc etc) that the application needs during install, running and using the application will be fast and won’t require those things to be downloaded each time.
[...]
Now of course we have the Internet so we don’t have the disks. That’s meant that software can be updated almost continuously, many times a day in order to fix bugs and add features. However, to do this you need a mechanism to update your application. For instance the mechanism that Windows uses is Windows Update.
Did the Microsoft Teams team use Windows Update as their update mechanism, similar to Skype for Business and the rest of the Office Suite? Er, no. They used Squirrel.Sigh. HTML has a distribution and updating mechanism right in its core. If you're building your app on HTML, why the fuck not just use that?
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@marczellm said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Microsoft Teams
This is not your Grandfather’s Microsoft, or even your Father’s Microsoft. There has been huge change in the last few years in the development category of Microsoft applications, with a real move towards open-source first.
Which, coincidentally, is also when the majority of Microsoft stuff started to suck balls.
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@anonymous234 Also, the application is cross-platform, so obviously Windows-only update mechanism would not cut it.
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@bulb said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@anonymous234 Also, the application is cross-platform, so obviously Windows-only update mechanism would not cut it.
I know a cross-platform method of updating web apps: Cache invalidation.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@bulb said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
I know a cross-platform method of updating web apps: Cache invalidation.Yes. But this is not a web app. It is a hybrid app. The resources are installed, not cached.
@anonymous234 said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Sigh. HTML has a distribution and updating mechanism right in its core.
Does it? I don't know that HTML would have any. HTTP does have (or rather is) one, but hybrid apps are installed, not served over HTTP.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@bulb said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@anonymous234 Also, the application is cross-platform, so obviously Windows-only update mechanism would not cut it.
I know a cross-platform method of updating web apps: Cache invalidation.
But isn't that one of the two hardest things in computer science, along with naming things and off-by-one errors?
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@benjamin-hall said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
two...off-by-one errors?
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@bulb said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Yes. But this is not a web app. It is a hybrid app. The resources are installed, not cached.
That's 99% the same thing. Stuff gets downloaded before first use, stuff gets re-downloaded whenever there's a change.
@anonymous234 said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Sigh. HTML has a distribution and updating mechanism right in its core.
Does it? I don't know that HTML would have any. HTTP does have (or rather is) one, but hybrid apps are installed, not served over HTTP.
Initially it had a simple cache-manifest file that simply listed files that should be cached offline. This turned out to not be complicated enough for some purposes, so it was deprecated and replaced with service workers. A service worker is, get this, a javascript file that runs in its own thread, completely separate from the website, and "manually" fetches all the files necessary to make your application run offline. Then it gets periodically run in the background by your browser forever.
So it has two. One that's too simple and useless, and one that's terribly overcomplicated and y.
Though they're not supported by Edge yet, so that could be why Microsoft doesn't want to use them.
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@anonymous234 said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
That's 99% the same thing. Stuff gets downloaded before first use, stuff gets re-downloaded whenever there's a change.
Except it ain't. I've quickly checked VSCode (also Microsoft, also hybrid, also Electron-based) and all the code is part of the package.
@anonymous234 said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Initially it had a simple cache-manifest file that […]
@anonymous234 said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
[…] replaced with service workers […]
You are still talking about web applications, served over HTTP. Hybrid apps are not served by HTTP.
The reason to do a hybrid application instead of web one is that hybrid application has access to the system like any other native application. Anything that needs to work with local files more than occasionally being given one is not practical to be done as web app (it was practical as Chrome app, which is somewhere in between, but Chrome recently discontinued those except for ChromeOS).
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@bulb said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@tsaukpaetra said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@bulb said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
I know a cross-platform method of updating web apps: Cache invalidation.Yes. But this is not a web app. It is a hybrid app. The resources are installed, not cached.
So the cache comes prepopulated. What's the difference?
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@bulb said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@anonymous234 said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
[…] replaced with service workers […]
You are still talking about web applications, served over HTTP. Hybrid apps are not served by HTTP.
The reason to do a hybrid application instead of web one is that hybrid application has access to the system like any other native application. Anything that needs to work with local files more than occasionally being given one is not practical to be done as web app (it was practical as Chrome app, which is somewhere in between, but Chrome recently discontinued those except for ChromeOS).
No, I'm talking about html/javascript driven apps that auto update via http. There's no reason to assume a web anything is involved at all.
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@raceprouk said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
That's the default, but Swing at least had the Pluggable Look-And-Feel system, which IIRC came with defaults for Windows, MacOS (Classic, given the time it was), and a few Linux ones like Motif and GTK+.
An application I use regularly as part of my job:
Some of the styles have gone in and out of accuracy over the last few Windows versions (I guess not all the default colours were mapped to corresponding system defaults), but nevertheless:
@marczellm said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
do you really think that there exists even one user that is
- aware that such a thing as JVM properties exist
- interested in changing the default look and feel?
I did try it with the above application. Even tried out the Motif style for a bit, since I was also familiar with it from previous experience and it was a bit of nostalgia. Bit weird to see on a Windows box but fun. For a little while. Not to use regularly.
If I'd had to do it by modifying JVM options, though... no.
@steve_the_cynic said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
I meant the special way that Excel does it.
Yeah, it's always fun to go "copy the data, switch to the workbook I want to paste it in, create a new sheet, pas... oh."
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@benjamin-hall said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
But isn't that one of the two hardest things in computer science, along with naming things and off-by-one errors?
Yes, along with scoTHREApe creDINGep.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@bulb said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@anonymous234 said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
[…] replaced with service workers […]
You are still talking about web applications, served over HTTP. Hybrid apps are not served by HTTP.
The reason to do a hybrid application instead of web one is that hybrid application has access to the system like any other native application. Anything that needs to work with local files more than occasionally being given one is not practical to be done as web app (it was practical as Chrome app, which is somewhere in between, but Chrome recently discontinued those except for ChromeOS).
No, I'm talking about html/javascript driven apps that auto update via http. There's no reason to assume a web anything is involved at all.
No web is involved, ergo no cache is involved. The apps often are updated over http, because that's the general distribution mechanism, but they are updated as packages, not file-by-file. Therefore the cache is irrelevant and an updater is needed.
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@bulb said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
No web is involved, ergo no cache is involved.
Your implementation of the updater mechanism is not my problem.
Case in point, we were looking at a program launcher that updated itself in accordance to a manifest file located on some E3 bucket thing (served over http). By that manifest it could tell what files were therefore out of date and then fetch new replacements for each file as needed to sync up the local installation cache of the launcher.
If this sounds familiar, I'm talking about ClickOnce:
But please, pedant me more about "Only the web uses this mystery thing called 'cache'" and "distribution necessarily takes the form of 'packages' and not file-by-file".
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@marczellm Am I the only one amused at the idea that Microsoft apps devs would (apparently, according to Raymond Chen of all people) rather code in Javascript than C#?
I know that 'eating your own dogfood' was seen as a negative by MS devs back in to 1990s (which says a lot about them right there), but this is too much. Avoiding VB I can understand, but even though I despise C# personally, I can't see it as something that is so awful that it would be avoided within the company that came up with it. That's just bizarre to me.
And besides, JavaScript? I would have thought that they would prefer just about anything to JavaScript, especially given the disaster that was JScript (IIRC, it was almost as bad for them as their "let's highjack Java and call it Visual J++" lunacy). Then again, I would never have expected JavaScript to be so pervasive elsewhere, either, so what do I know?
I know it's late to be mentioning this, but I missed this thread earlier. Sorry.
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@scholrlea It's the way of the world, man, you gotta keep up!
I think it's because there is no comprehensive cross-platform UI solution for C# yet.
I like C# by the way.
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@scholrlea said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
I despise C# personally
C# is among my top four favorite languages.
Unless you mean this blakeystyle, and hate every language.
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@pie_flavor @ScholRLEA is a lisp weenie. He's not keen on any OO languages IIRC
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@scholrlea said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Am I the only one amused at the idea that Microsoft apps devs would (apparently, according to Raymond Chen of all people) rather code in Javascript than C#?
They don't. They code in TypeScript.
@scholrlea said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Avoiding VB I can understand, but even though I despise C# personally, I can't see it as something that is so awful that it would be avoided within the company that came up with it. That's just bizarre to me.
See, Microsoft needed a toolchain to target web. After all, Azure and related services is their main, and most reliable, revenue source lately. Silverlight is effectively dead, so direct use of .NET is out of question and Google already tried compiling from Java to JavaScript in GWT and it didn't really catch on either, so trying the same with C# didn't look exactly promising.
@scholrlea said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
And besides, JavaScript? I would have thought that they would prefer just about anything to JavaScript, especially given the disaster that was JScript (IIRC, it was almost as bad for them as their "let's highjack Java and call it Visual J++" lunacy). Then again, I would never have expected JavaScript to be so pervasive elsewhere, either, so what do I know?
EcmaScript is the only thing that works in all browsers and with suitable shim package even reasonably consistently. So you have to target JavaScript. Now they did learn the lesson from JScript failure. TypeScript is fully backward compatible extension of EcmaScript, so it seamlessly works with existing EcmaScript libraries. They also didn't try to write yet another interpreter this time and simply picked Electron, which is based on V8 and Chrome, for native execution.
This is more general change in Microsoft. Under Balmer, they tried to beat competition, usually by the embrace-extend-extinguish strategy, and often failed spectacularly like with J++, JScript, Silverlight etc. Under Nadella they gave that up, focus on the services and cooperate with other software vendors whenever it helps them get more customers to Azure.
@marczellm said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
I think it's because there is no comprehensive cross-platform UI solution for C# yet.
Cross-platform there is. But not a Web one and with migration towards hosted services they mainly need that.
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@maciejasjmj said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@marczellm said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
This is not your Grandfather’s Microsoft, or even your Father’s Microsoft. There has been huge change in the last few years in the development category of Microsoft applications, with a real move towards open-source first.
Which, coincidentally, is also when the majority of Microsoft stuff started to suck balls.
So what you're saying is, you don't remember anything from Microsoft before about 10-15 years ago?
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@marczellm said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
I think it's because there is no comprehensive cross-platform UI solution for C# yet.
Xamarin?
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@jaloopa said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
He's not keen on any OO languages IIRC
Not even CLOS?!?!
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@masonwheeler said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Xamarin?
Everyone ignores it. There's clearly a good, working way to make apps work on all operating systems. People just ignore it. Back when it was expensive, that made sense. Not now though.
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@magus That's odd, because a friend of mine is on the Xamarin team and he attends the same Users' Group meetings as I do, so I'm always hearing people talking about using Xamarin. :P
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@masonwheeler people who work with xamarin use xamarin. News at 11.
Meanwhile everyone is excited to switch from good languages to javascript!
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@magus said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
@masonwheeler said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
Xamarin?
Everyone ignores it. There's clearly a good, working way to make apps work on all operating systems. People just ignore it. Back when it was expensive, that made sense. Not now though.
Well, that and the inability for Google Play and similar to maintain shared libraries across unrelated apps. There's 15MB of bloat plus the app no matter how you slice it; good, useful apps are generally less than 8MB unless they need a lot of image/sound assets.
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@pie_flavor That should be your last concern when developing an app, especially at sizes like that.
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@magus You say that, but to the common dolt who thinks he's intelligent because he owns an Android, it can feel important. Bloat is bloat is bloat.
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@pie_flavor They do need to get better about this, and include less of the framework if they don't use it, but honestly, we need to ignore them. We're talking 1/10 the size of most single page web apps these days.
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@magus Like I said, common dolts. They don't see how big their webpage is getting unless they look for it. They directly see how big their app is. It's about marketing.
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@scholrlea said in Big list of webapps masquerading as native:
And besides, JavaScript? I would have thought that they would prefer just about anything to JavaScript, especially given the disaster that was JScript (IIRC, it was almost as bad for them as their "let's highjack Java and call it Visual J++" lunacy).
What was the JScript disaster I'm apparently unaware of? I recall JScript just being JavaScript that had some extra objects when run in CScript or WScript. When I was writing such scripts ~13 years ago (for AD management tasks etc.) I eventually switched from VBScript to JScript because I liked the syntax better (I missed braces, etc.) and never had any problems with it.