Re:It’s time to kill the web app
by mike_hearn on Sunday September 24, 2017 @09:21AM
(#15324597)
Very few web apps actually use the same HTML for desktop and mobile. It's more common for WordPress templates and other document-like things, but the UI constraints on a phone are so different that it's better to create a dedicated UI for them. So I'm not sure judging VB6 by that metric is valuable.
It's not just mobile though - it's different dpi (4k screens are getting more popular), window sizes and zoom levels. Mobile is probably not a target for the forms apps the OP is talking about, but tablets may be, and different generations of various laptops and PCs are.
Web works across everything with little to no extra effort, whereas native app built with WYSIWYG UI builder is going to be constrained to certain hardware and take extra effort for handling display variations.
Re:It’s time to kill the web app
by mike_hearn on Sunday September 24, 2017 @03:24PM
(#15326074)
HiDPI was pioneered by Apple whose UI toolkits aren't particularly responsive at all.
You can certainly handle different window sizes with traditional UI layout managers. The only thing they don't do much of is totally changing the entire UI layout based on window size, and that's only because it's so rare to have a single app that's actually identical between tiny and huge screens.
Super easy, VB.NET with WPF or UWP layouts.
WPF is much closer to web development than the drag and drop WYSIWYG UI development (VB6 / WinForms) the OP was taking about. I've never done UWP but it sounds nearly the same as WPF.
Microsoft stuff was going for fixed screen size/resolution, fixed layout, and using a quite limited set of controls.
Web browsers try to be accommodating by default - any screen size (including mobile), zoom built in, and significantly more powerful control primitives that allow enormous flexibility in the way to design things.
If you're building forms applications that only need to work on a PC, the old way was certainly easier, and in fact, Microsoft has WebForms (regular ASP.NET - not MVC or API) that is pretty similar (and doesn't horribly break down so long as you color within the lines, so to speak).
Try to imagine your vb6 app being able to scale down to window the size of a phone screen, and how the WYSIWYG editor for that works even work - I imagine it would be fair to describe it as "hot garbage" also.