Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison.
As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.
Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps. It's an instructive story of how an inferior product can win. I'm not saying that happens all the time or that it's inevitable, but I think it's safe to say that's sort of what happened here.
I wonder how much of it was because they had a sorry arse mobile browser? Not supporting ontouchstart etc events must have been a killer. MSPointerEvent was awfully buggy in the initial release, and what dev wants to rewrite their web app/page to use PointerEvent?
Why wouldn't you make sure Hybrid apps (Cordova etc) work well? Why not just copy WKWebView (20/20 hindsight now!).
Their equivalent of WKWebView is some sort of zombie IE11 version (not edge, with different features and flaws than IE11 desktop). Hideous.
Disclosure: we developed a Hybrid app for Windows Phone (based on Xamarin).
A far cry from developers, developers, developers.
Also being able to select text from most anywhere was useful.
Windows Phone though? Absolute pleasure to type on. I've never used any device that was easier to type on than my old Lumia 920.
It's effectively single-threaded, with all the I/O running on the same thread as the GUI (oh import is so fun). And you need to load the entire metadata database for a folder into memory at once.
I have looked into fixing it before, but it does require redoing pretty much the entire API, which means its several man-years of developer work. And Mozilla has never invested enough in Thunderbird to let that sort of work get done.
I leave Thunderbird open in the background and come back to a notification that some component or other crashed. Happens all the time, no clue why. Email is common enough that I'd expect there to be a half-decent client for it, but I don't know of one...
(IRC is also common, at least among people who write code, but I don't know of a free client that isn't worse than running irssi in cygwin.)
This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen. I have hundreds of thousands of mails in tbird, in various accounts and folders. It's never struck me as slow. And its search (one of the features i use most) is simply fast.
I see it both fast and slow. Ironically it's absurdly slow on my 8-core desktop and just fine on my older dual core laptop (both with SSDs and same accounts, etc). Definitely weird, but this behaviour has peristed for years, so much that I had to disable TB features on my desktop just so I could type without stalling.
Might also recommend a disk check, perhaps FS needs fixing.
While helpful advice - if you need to do this manual maintenance regularly, the application is broken.
One day I'll finally take the plunge and jump to notmuch, which I've been told is the only email client actually capable of handling millions of emails without sucking.
The rendering corruption/lag issue with scrolling only happens while scrolling a message while in split-pane view, not when the message is maximized in its own tab.
Example: on two identical iMacs (4 cores, 16GB RAM, PCIe SSD) with about 100GB of local synced IMAP and the same accounts, it's slow for one user's iMac but fast on the other. Deleted TB and profile, fresh user, fresh TB install, fresh config; same result.
I don't have either of those problems, using TB for a decade. Not sure what your issue could be but first thoughts would be to compact your folders and if that doesn't help, vacuum the sqlite files.
Compared to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook online it's very very fast. Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird.
To be fair, my work email account is an exceptional case - it's got somewhere around ~1 million emails.
Gmail, particularly with the new Gmail interface launched a few months ago, also sucks performance wise, but in different ways from Thunderbird.
The number of times where I am typing an email and somehow trigger hot keys is absolutely ridiculous. Mid-word and suddenly I've deleted the draft, changed labels, and muted & archived a critical conversation is absolutely infuriating. It's Outlook level bad.
There is an Android launcher (launcher 10, i think) that offers tiles, and some of them even live tiles. It's okay, not quite the same slick experience though.
I still miss having my next appointment on my lock screen. The Pixel gets this mostly right with calendar info on the ambient screen display, but still seems a bit shy about showing it.
So download widgets to show what you want?
I don't think anyone ever liked developing for the web. It solved three problems pretty well:
- Data portability: log in from anywhere, have your data at your fingertips.
- App model: no broken installations of programs into desktop environments, dependency problems, DLL hell
- No concern about the mostly broken Windows desktop: viruses, etc.
(1) is mostly a solved problem even on desktop, the web just got there first. We have everything from Dropbox to various data APIs.
(2) is largely solved in mobile app development. It's instructive to consider how: very locked-down app APIs to the operating systems (e.g. no dumping files all over the place), standard packaging formats and distribution channels (.apk, .msi), etc
(3) is also mostly solved on mobile.
I would go as far as to say that in 2018, software should be native-first. And indeed it is, in mobile. The major shift is desktop->mobile. Mobile development has much more in common with native desktop development than web development. The reason desktop isn't likely to come back is because it's a niche market. Everyone has a phone but if you aren't in tech circles, it's surprising to see how many people barely use computers at all, especially those who don't work in offices, older folks, and the less well-off. A mobile device does about 99% of what they need -- most people aren't "creators", they don't author websites, write code, edit videos, design buildings, etc.
I work in a warehouse, and the specific thing I do requires a laptop. They've tried to train backups for me, but they have a hard time finding people who know how to use a computer. Most people don't - they only have a smartphone.
But this is precisely the problem. And also why mobile apps aren't really native, nor becoming native. Developers think, "since our app is just a thin wrapper on our web service, why not just make a webview and do everything through the web?". APIs being opaque to the system means you don't own the data. Saving actual files in actual filesystem is still much better for user freedoms.
> A mobile device does about 99% of what they need -- most people aren't "creators", they don't author websites, write code, edit videos, design buildings, etc.
True to some extent, but how many of those things they would be doing if the mobile platform wasn't limiting them? Users don't imagine the hypothetical things they could be doing, they choose from what's available.
I call it “the Photoshop test”: Pretend you’re Adobe and you just invented Photoshop in 2018. How do you build the GUI for each desktop operating system?
...considering you need to do things like OpenGL hardware acceleration, 30-bit color, support binary plugins, and access certain low-level hardware features (e.g. supporting TWAIN, Pro-level broadcast media devices and interfaces, etc).
On Windows it’s an unfortunate situation because all of the “new” application frameworks since 1998 are unsuitable: WPF is .NET only, UWP requires your application to run in a sandbox, you can’t even use MFC because it’s tightly coupled to User32 with its lack of support for 30-bit color. The only choice is the long hard road of doing almost everything by yourself through low-level interfaces with the DWM. Not pretty.
The sad thing is that UWP is very capable - if it weren’t for the sandboxing then it would be perfect (that, and you would need to build your own widget library as UWP’s stock set is almost entirely touch-first controls that are utterly inappropriate for a mouse-first desktop UI)
There's so much malware, anti-virus that slows down all I/O, browser toolbars, etc. Just open Internet Explorer and see how long it takes. On my computer it takes <1s. On many computers I've used in peoples' homes, small offices, etc. it's more like 10.
Calling that anything but "broken" seems like a misnomer. Look at the 99% of computer users, not the 1% power users/people at companies with good IT groups.
In a similar vein, Palm webOS. I still maintain that it was several years ahead of its time with the whole "mobile apps using javascript" Enyo framework.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS
[2]: https://pivotce.com/2018/11/28/luneos-november-stable-releas...
Seriously, I recently had to disable Thunderbird's spellchecking so that typing emails wouldn't stall for 5+ seconds at a time on my 8-core machine. Ironically, my older dual core machine has no such problems, and the same email accounts, OS and extensions are at play.
It's not the world's most advanced mobile OS, but a good way to escape the Apple and Google ecosystems.
It is possible to purchase the OS and install it to Sony Xperia phones. https://shop.jolla.com
Not enough people value openness to make the trade off versus iOS and Android.
Does iOS not provide the privacy you need?
I think Purism would be satisfied with much less initial adoption on the overall market than somebody like Mozilla/Canonical. In short, they'd probably consider it a success much sooner. Also, both FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Touch were essentially adopting the same philosophy as Android in terms of having a closed-hardware approach and a software stack that while open in principle, was largely restricted on-device to run just the apps available in the respective app-stores, made for the platform specifically, which weren't that many.
Purism is making it so that practically any Linux app can be installed out of the box and with a small amount of work, any GTK3/4 app can be made touch friendly as well. I think this could provide them the app ecosystem head start they'd need.
> Not enough people value openness to make the trade off versus iOS and Android.
I think you're, sadly, right. However if PurismOS becomes a solid choice in its own right and then you have the privacy advantage on top, it might sell.
> Does iOS not provide the privacy you need?
Kind of, that's what I use now, however I have to trust Apple on keeping its word, which may be difficult considering they're moving more and more into "services" == rent seeking. Also, I have serious problems with the war on general purpose computing Apple is involved in and the closed nature of their software, where they have the ultimate say in what I can run on a piece of hardware I paid thousand pounds for to own, not rent.
Google oozes from every part of Android. I very much doubt that installing LineageOS with closed-source blobs for most of the hardware makes Google/NSA/OEMs completely unaware of your activity. Moreover, Android is such a critical piece of software that probably every significant 3 letter agency in the world has some sort of a backdoor in/to it. Android suffers a security fiasco quite often and the update situation is quite awful. Lineage is also often not as stable as one'd like and the update process from one major version to another can be itself nerve-wrecking.
On the technical side, it is running ancient, out-of-tree kernels that lack a lot of the security work going upstream, which is especially concerning considering there's a new Spectre variant patch in practically every release.
Lastly, having the full GNU/Linux experience in my pocket is something I've always wanted.
Whether 'regular users' care about this is not particularly concerning to me, as I think the 'enthusiast crowd' is large enough to get the ecosystem started and once we feel comfortable recommending this to our 'regular' family members and friends, they need not to be aware of any of the additional benefits - it would be just the new smartphone that they have.
Nevertheless, I hope that Purism will be able to deliver a product which is as easy to use as a "normal" Android device with those privacy/sustainability features as a bonus. That way I might be able to give the people who ask me which phone they should buy next some good advice.
We have TypedArrays, WebAssembly, very smart JITs. With Typescript, JavaScript is a very productive and sane language to work with.
I 100% agree with you that the current state of desktop apps are extremely bloated.
Mostly agree with your comment on the broader point that front-end (coding) is a lot saner than it used to be. This sentence however sounds to me like "With C, assembler is a very productive and sane language to work with." (FTR: I used to enjoy assembler.)
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles.....
Would love to see a 64 bit version and with some more advanced features.
Still loving it and it's one of my main stream editor which just works with just one executable and part of my big list of portable apps collection which mostly consists of single executable based tools for almost any task!!!
and while javascript is certainly one of the worst choices if you care about performance, it's also one of the best choices if you need to iterate really quickly (which I believe is very important in overall, especially for new projects)
I hope there will be lighter electron one day (I'm actually working on something like this already) but it's unlikely that people will start doing UIs in systems languages.
XULRunner does the same thing, includes, in addition, a full XML GUI language and assorted technologies and the full runtime distribution, on my Windows10 system, including debugging, crash-reporter aids, VC libraries, D3D libraries, consumes 72MB.
it's nowhere near to XUL but it's also little more powerful because of react (vdom is more dynamic than XML, it will be possible to use react-devtools and it should support HMR too)
xulrunner may be a superior technology, but if it's a PITA to work with, then nobody is going to want to use it.
Documentation was poor or non-existent and IIRC the API was based on the half-baked XPCOM because COM and CORBA were all the rage at the time it was created.
That's absolutley not true.
"Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" has been published before 2004. It is still online: http://mb.eschew.org/
XUL (and assorted technologies) is/were broadly documentet on MDN.
When xulrunner was being developed there wasn't the same interest in desktop software. It seems like Chromium reached a point where you could build desktop-class software, but the distribution model wasn't right. Someone then decided to adapt Chromium to solve the distribution problem and you have Electron.
If Firefox had evolved to allow the tipping point experience that Chrome did, then you might well have seen xulrunner be that thing. It was years ahead of itself, but perhaps you could question the focus of the folks on the Mozilla side who were spread across so many concepts/ areas compared to the folks at Google - but I think that's for a different thread.
Really?
webapp development is a lot of work and SPAs are actually even harder... and so is server development with node. I love javascript, yet I don't think it's suitable for everything.
electron got popular, because companies could reuse code and tooling, only for the cost of cpu & memory
javascript is very dynamic and V8 has very limited time to make its magic so the optimizations can't ever reach level of rust/c++ (but V8 can do some runtime-only optimizations)
it's very hard to predict performance of given code (and this itself is why it's the worst choice for perf-sensitive code, V8 is moving target, and what was fast yesterday might be slow tomorrow - so basically, it's not worth time and money to actually spend too much time optimizing javascript, it's much better to identify hot spots and do them in rust/c++)
It usually doesn't matter and it's more than fast enough for any kind of scripting, but it's certainly not a good fit for cpu-heavy tasks. I love javascript, to be clear.
BTW: run some node.js code with --print-opt-code so you have an idea how big amount of code is generated even for very simple things.
Don't dismiss it because of the lack of bells and whistles on its web page, it runs circles around everything else. Outlook mail folders also can be imported through an external utility. Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and reportedly can be built on MacOSX.
https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/features.php
"Continuously improving since 1998"
Agree. It feels like apple respect users privacy which is great, but are you not interested in ios you are stuck with android and how google collects everything about its users, which feels really bad. I also think that "google play store" is rather bad. So it really needs competition here and a 3rd option.
What I really hope is that Microsoft (which have the muscles) should embrace android fully and build an "MS android app store" and an ecosystem around it for android so there could be an real option and competition to google and "google play store" on android.
WP died a lot because it did have to few apps. But because this should be android, developers shouldn't need to convert any apps, just simple upload the same app to "MS android app store" too, more or less. This way they could get a lot of apps in their app store and fast. To get developers to upload they could give better deals (ex lower %) and for users they could give an better user experience, focus on privacy like apple to differentiate them self from google and play store etc to get traction and popularity.
If MS did and got some traction, smartphone manufacturers would have an real option not to be forced to install play store and all googles apps just to be able to sell their phones, because there whould be an viable option for it users to download all android apps they want anyways. And competition is always good for consumers. At least for me, I would love to buy an android phone without google, with someone that respected and focused on privacy, and with an good app store out of the box.
For those of you haven't tried a Windows Phone, this video gives a good overview of some features:
I Used a Windows Phone for a Week in 2018! I Will Miss It:
It seems to be missing an OSX client, but Windows and Linux is supported.
When I have 100 firefox tabs open and it starts to go wonky my thunderbird also has issues doing just about anything. Sometimes even get the "stop this script" on occasion.
I think this has more to do with the java heavy pages in firefox getting bogged down while other software is trying to run backup tasks and AV and such.
I still enjoyed the older outlook, but with the current two I'm not longing for shiny new tools lately. I also realize that my lack of trust in cloud servicing means I am not using some likely popular features like calendar notifications and other things that may be important to others. So bias, ymmv, etc.
On the other hand I think the web is awesome and I’m 36, I remember very well what the landscape looked before web apps. So I don’t understand the fetish for native to be honest.
Will probably come back with edge-computing.
Interesting, haven't had performance problems with email in about well, never. Been using Thurderbird for a decade. Not perfect, but slowness isn't a problem.
Nobody cared about Windows phone and nobody noticed when it died.
It enjoys the same prestige as Microsoft Bob.
I hope the SublimeHQ gods are listening to this
The gigants buy up competitors and bury it, shot down the project.
We would have more freedom and viable options as consumers if not the big companies such as Facebook, Google buy up the competition. It should be illegal to do this. The world is a more poorer marketplace because of this.
* Microsoft Image Composer. A little known sprite-oriented graphic arts program. Combining its sprite model with the necessary several years of modernization it would have enjoyed had it not been abandoned would be impressive and easy to use.
* High-performance lightweight desktop email clients. I was especially fond of one named AK-Mail in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Blisteringly fast on PCs of its era, a modern incarnation would seem incomprehensibly fast compared to today's bloated apps that have difficulty keeping up with keystrokes on 8-core 3.5 GHz monsters. Of course, back in the day, desktop apps were built in systems languages and not in JavaScript.
* As a broader concept, a return to prevailing use of on-device processing and computation. Today the too-facile argument that data must be shipped off-network to a third-party cloud in order to be processed efficiently means this happens all the time without users paying it any attention.
[1] https://twitter.com/boxnwhisker/ (scroll down to see a bunch of examples)