Comment by Jason Knight on "Are desktop apps generally still a thing?"

Winrar, 7-zip, Media Player Classic, VLC, OpenOffice, Filezilla, qBittorrent, Pidgin, Photoshop, Illustrator, Paint Shop Pro, 7 task tweaker, Classic Shell, GIMP, gEdit, NotePad 2, EditPlus, Notepad++, Reaper, CuBase, Cakewalk, IMGburn, Malwarebytes, VirtualBox, VMWare, the version of Skype that WORKS (as opposed to the broken pile of crap built into win 10), IE, Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari...

Still looks like a "thing" to me. Actively developed "things" at that. Though perhaps pointing out that browsers are in fact desktop applications may have been a bit on the snarky side of things...

But what do I know?!? I still use WinAmp. It really whips the llama's ass.

Just what made you think it's not a "thing"? Full stack web crapplets are still considered "crapplets" by DESKTOP users for a reason; they're slow, bloated, and usually crippled compared to their conventional counterparts. Same reason Windows users tell desktop Java to "suck it". Ever see a Swing crapplet on Winblows? Yeah, that.

Though it is getting comical how full stack JavaScript is now resulting in better quality front-ends and usability than ANYTHING anyone EVER slopped together with desktop Java; only proving what a moronic dead-end technology Java truly is.

That and to be brutally frank there are a lot of things (professional audio for example) you can't even come CLOSE to doing with a full stack JS crapplet. In that way they're often more crippled than 1990's pre .NET Visual Basic crapplets... aka back when the term "crapplet" was coined.

Joe Gaspar It ran deeper than that on Java's failure. The fact it couldn't be trusted in browsers made a LOT of desktop users just flat out refuse to allow it to be installed. Amongst Joe Sixpack and Susie Sunshine desktop users Java has a worse reputation than Flash -- and that says a hell of a lot. That stigma follows Java just about everywhere it goes, which is why for all intents and purposes Java on the desktop is DEAD. (as evidenced by it rotting on the vine in terms of browser and system support). The relative JUNK every program for the desktop written using it tends to be certainly didn't endear it to users either -- I mean, what was the "Big" killer App built with it? Limewire?!? That too says a hell of a lot about it.

As to the Web Audio API, it remains with far, FAR too high a latency to be even remotely useful for professional use. It's BARELY competent enough for use in building games and to be frank, I still reject Canvas+JS+Web Audio for building games on those grounds (and find the games built with those technologies annoying due to that same lag). The lag between an event firing the ATTEMPT at playing a sound and that sound actually playing is still AGONIZINGLY slow and as such it ends up USELESS for anything realtime.

... and if you're working in realtime low latency is a must have. Until Web Audio hits latency times down around what ASIO or WSAPI can deliver, web technology crapplets will NOT be able to compete with desktop apps. Same way that Linsux is relatively useless compared to OSuX or Winblows on audio. There's a -- pardon the pun -- "reason" you don't see a lot of professional audio done with Linsux. Between the dearth of driver support, AGONIZINGLY high latency, and relative lack of well written programs it ends up to this day a tinkertoy even when compared to Windows 98!

Bottom line, until we see something capable of REALTIME audio along the lines of Reaper or Reason, "web audio" remains a pathetically crippled toy!

Search Hashnode