Why I'm Done Making Desktop Applications

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck. They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern if you're trying to grow your user…

Every time I take a stab at a web gui app, I’m daunted. The toolkits, the apparently billions of dependencies, the vastly complicated build processes. I tried again recently. HTML file and a separate JS file. Some SVG elements with a click handler. I had mouse in and mouse out logic, and that worked great. But for some reason the click handler did not. I tried it in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. It worked in Firefox. It did not work…

All true in 2009. In 2022, I'm less sure. We seem to be back to bloated software with deep and complex dependencies that allow down release cycles and innovation. try doing the 67 releases that the author cited when you have to wrestle with where your framework is going to subtly break. I assert two laws of softwarw. 1. every piece of software has a point where the power of the software vs its complexity is maximized. beyond this point…