https://www.onshape.com Build by some Solidworks people offering basically the same experience but in the browser with server side computation. Very promising as it tries to solve problems which the older CAD players can't tackle with there current desktop tech.

God, I have such mixed feelings after viewing the product overview video on their site.

On the one hand, you can't deny the wins that comes from bullshit-free operations - no installing, no permissions, no need to deal with sysadmins to approve a new program[0], and updates do themselves. Files are backed up and trivially shared across devices.

On the other hand, you're now locked in to a vendor system, with vendor software doing file management, version control and sharing. You need constant access to Internet to do anything at all.

Then there's also issue of performance. I actually registered for a free personal account and started playing with this software. I saw more-less what I expected: it kinda works, like most such web tools kinda work - good enough to do something, but laggy and slow enough to piss me off if I were to spend more than 10 minutes designing anything in it.

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I can understand all the cloud nonsense (though I prefer regular files, thank you very much). But from the quick experience, the application would feel much better if it was a desktop/mobile native program, not a webapp. It's like with Google Office suite - looks cool to have it in a browser and it sorta can help with the basic things, but try to build a reasonably-sized document, spreadsheet or slideshow, and the performance drop will make you tear your hair out.

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[0] - How security is done on work machines is ridiculous, though it's a separate topic. I'll just leave this: https://xkcd.com/1200/.

You guys all have kill cords attached to your wrist, right? https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill

I dread whenever I need to open MS Word and choose G Suite anytime I need to write a longer document...

Because you are on Linux, or because you like your software laggy? ;).

Office suite takes a ridiculous time to load on OS X. Plus stuff like Word is painfully over bloated.

If you need to print something that looks reasonably nice - then maybe Word would make sense.

Thankfully we are sort of living in digital era where printing is synonym to bureaucracy.

I don't think writing a browser based, professional, CAD application is out of the question. Especially with WASM gaining support in modern browsers and WebGL2.

I think this was done a few years ago, but it still amazes me.

http://www.meshlabjs.net/

WebGL2 is a nice toy for writing blog posts, nothing more.

All my mobile devices have OpenGL ES 3.x running intensive native games without issues.

Yet for mobile browsers I have to specifically enable the WebGL 2 support.

No user without technical skills is ever going to deep dive in the browser flags to enable WebGL content on computers that don't have any issue playing 3D games.

It's enabled by default on Chrome for Android and Android webview now.

Not if the GPU is blacklisted for whatever reason, in spite native games not having any issue with it.

For a company like Palantir, I would imagine most of their clients are running older browsers, possibly even IE <10 still.

I'm not familiar with their product, but a web app would certainly introduce more developer time spent on keeping cross-compatibility with older browsers while a Java/native app is practically WYSIWYG.

Maybe two fun data points:

-- We achieve magnitudes higher visual scale via GPU client/cloud computing... while running in a browser

-- We intersect with some of Palantir's customers (though we're more fortune 2000 sec/fraud/etc.), and are deploying fine. WebGL is ~5 years old.

This may also be a good point to note.. The Graphistry team is ~doubling! If scaling visual analytics for cybersecurity, anti-fraud, etc., sounds worthwhile, please send your CV/LinkedIn/Github to [email protected] !