Re:Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop...
by ViViDboarder on Saturday January 26, 2019 @12:11PM
(#19007162)
It would be great to provide platform specific implementations for projects! However if you’re a one/small developer shop, it’s just impractical to target all available platforms.
We’re in a world where there are a large number of platforms asking for support, and I just don’t have time for that. If I’m able to support a single app for all, that’s a major win.
Re:Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop...
by chiefalchemist on Friday January 25, 2019 @08:50AM
(#18997814)
> "...it's underrated because it's not realized, thanks to most apps doing their best to _not_ fit in the platform..."
At first I did agree. But then my second thought was: this calls into question some very significant and very experienced brands. To think that many, that big, are doing it wrong naturally doesn't feel right.
Re:Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop...
by jpetso on Friday January 25, 2019 @10:27AM
(#18998724)
It makes sense though: The bigger the brand, the more they want to control their brand experience instead of being tied to /associated with another brand, i.e. the native platform.
Businesses don't innately care about doing what's right, so optimizing for brand differentiation over a unified platform experience is what one would expect to happen in most cases.
I disagree; the benefit isn't overrated, it's underrated because it's not realized, thanks to most apps doing their best to _not_ fit in the platform. What full platform fit enables is consistent UX and interoperability. Lack of the latter places an actual cap of what users can do (except for the small percent that can force an app to interoperate, whether it likes it or not).
In my not so humble opinion, the current UX trends are based on circular reasoning - users don't demand functionality, interoperability and ergonomic design because those are rarely given to them, so they don't know they could have it. And since they're not demanding, this is used as a justification to not give it.
> After all the whole webapp-everything somewhat shows that people don't care that much, they are happy to use GMail for example.
It doesn't show that. It's just that people don't have much choice anyway. Crappy and bloated GMail UI vs. Thunderbird that requires a little bit of knowledge to set up. That's the choice.
Most software, including webpages, isn't substitute goods. Fastmail isn't a substitute to GMail once you have an account. LibreOffice isn't a substitute for Google Docs, not once someone shares a document with you through Google's cloud. Network effects are powerful, and they reinforce the basic way normal people treat software - as magic, "gift from gods", something that works the way it works because that's how it works.
I'm just pointing this out, because I hate the constant use of "the market decided" and "users voted with their wallets/eyeballs" as justification for bad engineering. It's mostly circular reasoning.
> Another family of examples would be the big software packages like the Adobe or Autodesk stuff, they tend to have a fairly custom look&feel.
Those are somewhat special cases, because they need so much functionality packed in the UI that they replace platform's conventions with ones better suited to the problem.
(Sometimes it leads to weird stuff, like Photoshop and its dialog boxes, in which buttons change meaning when you hold down CTRL.)