Re:Notepad++ v8 release
by BeFlatXIII on Monday June 07, 2021 @10:19AM
(#27422911)
Then what software is there for us who do wish to be power users? If it gets eliminated through atrophy, that is yet another example of market failure.
Old software, software developed by passionate devs, software developed by small companies.
And, yes, the market is shrinking and you can see the rust spots. Pidgin used to be a top-notch multi-messenger, now it's a ghost town. Just one example.
I don't know what the end state is, but I can't imagine it's pretty, especially since fewer and fewer people will use desktops/laptops, both as absolute numbers and as percentages.
Re:Notepad++ v8 release
by datavirtue on Monday June 07, 2021 @10:51AM
(#27423278)
The future is clearly cross platform where you meet the customer where they are...mobile, desktop, web. Maybe the application morphs a bit by including or excluding features for various platforms but there is no way to proclaim that there is one platform you can focus on to the exclusion of others in a general sense.
If I'm writing serious business software the web and desktop are king and quickly becoming synonymous given technologies like xamarin forms, ionic, and electron. I'm building an app in ionic using html/css/JavaScript (angular) that is primarily for desktop (electron) but will deploy to mobile and web, allowing me to meet people where and how they want to work.
We're never going to go back to the old days. Back then desktop computing was 100% of end user computing and everyone assumed all users end up as power users.
Now desktop computing is ~30% of end user computing and shrinking and we realize that most people have absolutely no desire to become power users. It's not that they can't, they don't want to (think other interests, anti-intellectualism, etc).
Also mobile computing by its nature (being on the move, having to pay attention to real life, constrained hardware interfaces) requires simplified UIs.