Nothing in this article is wrong, but worth noting that pre-AI, the companies that most significantly transformed the way we use our computers (Slack, Spotify, VS Code, etc.) did ship desktop apps.
“Desktop Apps”? I’d say pre-Electron, the ones that existed that far back shipped desktop apps, but for the past 10-15 years it’s all been Electron slop, which hardly qualify as “desktop apps” in my book.
If anything, it’s my very faint hope that AI would give companies - especially non-software companies - the bandwidth to release two real native apps instead of just 2 builds of a shitty Electron app. Fat chance though, I think, not least because companies love to use their “bRaNdInG” on everything - so the native look and feel a real app gives you “for free” is a downside for the clowns that do the visual design for most companies.
For what it’s worth, I tried making a GTK4 app. I got started, created a window, created a header bar, then went to add a url/path entry widget and everything fell apart.
Entry suggestions/completions are formally deprecated with no replacement since 2022. When I did get them working on the deprecated API there was an empty completion option that would segfault if clicked. The default behaviour didn’t hide completions on window unfocus, so my completions would hover over any other open window. There was seemingly no way to disambiguate tab vs enter events… it just sucked.
So after adding one widget I abandoned the project. It felt like the early releases of SwiftUI where you could add a list view but then would run into weird issues as soon as you tried adding stuff to it.
Similarly trying to build an app for macOS practically depends on Swift by Sundell Hacking with Swift or others to make up for Apple’s lack of documentation in many areas. For years stuff like NSColor vs Color and similar API boundaries added friction, and the native macOS SwiftUI components just never felt normal while I tried making apps.
As heavy as web libraries and electron are, at least work mostly out of the box.
I've used Qt off and on, and it's generally worked as advertised. Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job.
For prototyping / one-offs, I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk - object oriented Tcl with a decent set of widgets. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's pretty portable (should mostly work on every platform with minor changes), has a way to package up standalone executables, can ship many-files-as-one with an internal filesystem, etc..
Of course, I spent ~15 years in EDA, so it's much more comfortable than for most people, but it can easily be integrated into C/C++ as well with SWIG, etc.
> I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk
In the near future I need to lash up a windows utility to generate a bunch of PDF files from a CSV (in concert with GhostScript), with specific filenames. I was trying to figure out the best approach and hadn't even considered Tcl and Tk - with Itcl you might have just given me a new rabbithole to explore! Thanks! (...I think!)
I hope it works out! It's amazing how far Tcl/Tk has come since I "had" to use it as a wrapper around an X11 window back on an SGI Irix, using Tcl scripting to interface to an OpenGL backend. I think that was like 7.3.x or something in 1994. And it was pretty cool back then already! The team around Tcl is small, but dedicated and brilliant, IMHO.
>Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job.
QCanvas (or was it QGraphicsCanvas?) has long since been replace with QGraphicsScene, which is much more capable and doesn't suffer from pixelation issues.
Probably. We paid thousands / year for the developer seat in our startup, and in the end, it wasn't great. I did manage to make the Tcl/Tk event loop and the Qt event loop work together, so we could have Tk windows inside a Qt app!
> If anything, it’s my very faint hope that AI would give companies - especially non-software companies - the bandwidth to release two real native apps instead of just 2 builds of a shitty Electron app.
Anthropic has the resources of a fully armed and operational Claude Mythos (eyeroll), but they still choose to shit out an electron app on all of their users instead of going native like their competitors have done.
All of those examples are web apps, two of them started on the web itself, and none of them transformed anything about how we used our computers (slack replaced a number of competitors, spotify is iTunes for the web, and VS code is a smaller jetbrains)
This is the backdoor way of raising prices... just inflate the token pricing. It's like ice cream companies shrinking the box instead of raising the price
No, you're forgetting the never ending world shattering models being released every couple of months. Each one with 2X token costs of course, for a vague performance gain and that will deprecate the previous ones.
There are lots of passwords there (though one wonder if they were rotated). Basically, the people doing the hiring are sending PDFs with their credentials to the contractors to do the job.
This is why I love iOS in many ways: it's very difficult for an app to have "action at a distance" inside your OS. If you force-quit the app it's pretty much like it never existed.
I haven't used this one but WisprFlow is vastly better than the built-in functionality on MacOS. Apple is way behind even startups, even for fundamental AI functionality like transcribing speech
I'm speaking for >1 minute and including bulleted lists, etc. WisprFlow gets all of the bulleted lists formatted correctly, and I'm not saying things like "Bullet 1" -- just speaking as I'd speak to a person.
I can think of a benefit of having 1Gbps. I can't think of anything that a home user would benefit from 25Gbps that is something a government should actually care about (watching 10 different 8K Netflix streams at the same time is not a human rights issue)
Why does it have to work long term? Claude Code probably built it in 2 hours. Sell it for as long as it works. If it provides some value to some people during that time, good for them.
What a rotten state of affairs that we’re now openly suggesting producing garbage with the least effort possible and selling it until caught. We used to criticise those who did that, calling them spammers and scammers and worse. Now, “telling some LLM to take a dump and trying to sell it to some chumps without a sense of smell” is viewed as a smart business model. Anything for an extra buck.
Why is it garbage? If you want something to block YouTube shorts, here's something that does it. It won't work forever, but you won't pay forever. Not all software needs to be high-craft and high-quality. Sometimes it can be just something a guy sells you off the back of his truck.
You misunderstood. I’m not criticising this specific software, I’m criticising the attitude suggested by the parent comment. It was a general commentary, it has nothing to do with this particular app, which I have no idea if it was built that way.
Lifetime payment was highly requested by users (including existing users), since they have subscription fatigue. Since I use the app myself every day to reduce screentime myself I'm extremely motivated to fix every bug and make the UX as seamless as possible.
I agree with this in principle, but this seems conceptually at odds with selling lifetime licenses (which this product does). The lifetime license option reads like a statement of intention that they'll be around for a long time, but when the TOS of the underlying services come into play as they do here, offering (or buying) a lifetime license seems like a gamble.
It's still questionably legal (at least here in Europe) to sell a yearly subscription for something and then have it stop working halfway through the year.
They should probably care about not getting sued so easily.
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