For me, the compelling part was at my last company, we'd build these complicated distributed systems with a whole lot moving pieces—any of which could go down at a moment's notice. For a complex enough system, there was sometimes more work to be done to deal with any part of the system failing than to build the system itself. Basically, we were implementing our own bespoke version of Temporal over and over again.
To your point, the complexity of a SQL/PHP application is significantly smaller, but, the value proposition of Temporal is probably still there: If any part of the checkout process fails (e.g. charging the credit card, successfully triggering the order after they've charged the credit card, timing an email if there is an abandoned cart, handling the moving pieces of a return). These pieces are either handled manually by a human or you've got a decent amount of business logic in place to handle each of these edge cases individually.
The value-add of Temporal—in this case—would be that it would keep track of where the customer/order was in the overall flow of ordering something and pick up where it left off in the event that something went wrong.
There are some OS 9 ("Platinum") GTK themes, but AFAIK there's no clone of the classic finder available. Nor other parts of the default OS 8/9 desktop.
Which is quite interesting, considering that the classic Finder is often thought as the pinnacle of spatial navigation. And Linux does have more obscure file managers cloned, like Amiga's Dopus[1] or the RiscOS one[2].
Worth a warning: the recent history of GTK theming is pretty tortuous, and the GTK3 theming engine, while extremely flexible, doesn't really lend itself to non-modern (I can't think of a better euphemism) designs.
There are some themes, like Memphis98, that sort manage to create the sort of visual appearance that you're after. However, the GTK 3-ness is obvious even there: the "Open file..." dialog has huge, unresizable widgets on the left, combo bars are long. Lots of UI elements are bulky and oversized.
Consequently, in my experience, you're actually better off with a GTK2 theme and Qt applications with the gtk2 style engine.
I'm not really a fan of old-time themes -- I mean, I miss my Amiga but not that much. I know about this stuff for altogether different reasons -- I spent a lot of time trying to get a more compact layout, because GTK3 applications are pretty much unusable on small/low-density/low-resolution screens (and, IMHO, way too large even on "normal"-ish screens. I have a 27" monitor and, at 2560x1440, everything is so big it drives me nuts). I even tried to write my own, and failed pretty badly. So yeah.
Never mind that the biggest part of the classic finder experience wasn't the look-and-feel, so just a theme won't help you much.
And speaking of modern screens, even if you get a copy of the OS 9 font (Chicago?), it would look quite odd on high resolution, especially if it's anti-aliased.
And I definitely agree about the weird issues we've got with screen sizes today. I rarely get something in the "goldilocks" zone, either it's all Material/Aero with yuge margins and white space that would make Jan Tschichold blush, or its old UIs that are just a bit too small (try running the aforementioned Worker file manager on a HiDPi screen).
Mac OS 8 migrated from Chicago to Charcoal, I think. Chicago was resurrected as the UI font on the first iPods because it was a similar situation as the original Macintosh that Chicago was designed for (low-res monochrome screens).
Gnome's own Nautilus had direct support for spatial navigation for a long time in the Gnome 2 era (including briefly on by default in something like Gnome 2.6 before complaints reversed that decision), though it was obviously a small bit underwhelming compared to Mac Classic, and lost entirely in the Gnome 2 to 3 transition.
I haven't had a chance to download it yet, but my suspicion says it's probably an Electron application. What do you all feel about this practice of taking long-lived web applications and getting them out of a tab and into a desktop shell with a place on the dock/task bar and the ability to Atl/Control-Tab?
> What do you all feel about this practice of taking long-lived web applications and getting them out of a tab and into a desktop shell with a place on the dock/task bar and the ability to Atl/Control-Tab?
I intentionally do this with Chrome's Tools > More Tools > Add to Desktop > Open as New Window option. Wrapping Spotify Web, Outlook 365 and HipChat into their own "application"s lets me treat them as if they are native apps, but for some reason it uses a lot less resources than the actual native apps.
> but for some reason it uses a lot less resources than the actual native apps.
Because most "actual native apps" now are not native apps but electron or some other HTML + JS + CSS wrapper running an entire separate browser to render the app. By running the web page as separate windows you're effectively getting the same app but sharing the browser overhead.
Definitely some sort of electron app. Certain things are broken like trying to use your webcam to take a profile photo because it doesn't know how to ask for browser permissions.
This trend isn't going anywhere. It's efficient from a human resources perspective. It is very expensive to build and maintain products across native desktop (Mac and Windows), mobile (iOS and Android) and web. That's 5 platforms. Web on its own is hard enough with probably 6 or 7 different browser platforms and various screen sizes to accommodate. Electron is a godsend, sub-native performance or not.
Agreed, also it's a case of "good enough but will get better", the more people who use electron the more its performance will improve.
I was bearish on it initially but it's starting to prove itself in a way where I'm seriously considering it.
Also as a former desktop developer who moved to the web a lot of what it does looks pretty good tbh.
That and TypeScript has completely changed my opinion of "client side" web development, it's solved so much of the pain it's unbelievable and is good enough I'd consider it for desktop development for me the killer example is vscode - proof that you can write fast applications on the platform.
> It is very expensive to build and maintain products across native desktop
Yet (modulo mobile) somehow companies managed to do this in the 90s with far less productive development tools. The difference is the diluted power of the consumer: when software was a purchased product made for Ks of subscribing customers, small contingents of customers being upset about subpar UI and performance was a real threat to the viability of your business. Now Outlook or any Amazon app can be absolute slow, buggy garbage on nearly every platform (and they are), but the enormous customer base (diluting collective action) and entrenchment of locked-in platforms and data mean there's little incentive to obsess about product quality. Instead companies prioritize cost reduction, new customer acquisition (focusing on product chrome refreshes instead of robustness), or just give over to development momentum apathetic to quality.
> small contingents of customers being upset about subpar UI and performance was a real threat to the viability of your business
Only if there was a better alternative available, there was still plenty of garbage software. If someone made a product like Outlook with the backing that MS can provide, but better performing, everyone would use it. Case in point, G-Mail
In the 90s you could get away with making a Windows desktop app and call it a day. No one expected your web site to have all the same functionality as your desktop app. And mobile apps weren't a thing. Mac was also a small enough portion of the market to ignore for many products.
In what way? That services stop trying to be desktop applications and live on the web and web browser? Or that Electron itself is not an adequate framework for cross-platform development?
Notifications are always the killer feature for me on desktop and it's one of the main reasons i don't use gmail/hangouts/google calendar in the browser. Sure you can keep them open all day in a browser window, but i don't want permanent browser windows open all day.
I exclusively use those applications inside the browser and I have had no complaints about notifications. They ask for permission, I grant it, and I get (native, at least on OS X) notifications that match the rest of my system.
Genuinely curious, is there something I'm missing out on / some way they work better out of the browser?
I haven't downloaded either. You mentioned "out of a tab" and 'Atl/Control-Tab' context switching. I usually pin such an application in the browser; this makes it easy to go visit the site (on OSX and Chrome, use CMD+<tab #>, pinning makes it one of the first tabs so CMD+1 as an example) and easy to use the browser as intended and switch back to the web-app. You could look at the memory footprint of the tab vs. the application and the performance implications of using a desktop app vs. the web-app. That could be useful info. :)
I'm not sure anyone thinks its ideal but there is certainly software built with it that just wouldn't otherwise be, no matter how many people talk about Qt on here.
It's an inevitable step for any mature software application. At some point, the business side will want a feature that web browsers won't allow or have poor support for. Initially, developers push back and this feature gets delayed, but sure enough, executives get eager and eventually make the call to build a desktop app.
I have seen this twice now; our file transfer service was being hindered by poor file API support by the browsers, so we built a desktop app to wrap the web app and provide better file access. And for a shopping app to get around iframe restrictions.
Here is my take on what SendGrid does: Sending an email is pretty easy. Sending a metric butt ton is hard and so is hooking it into your app. So, we help you with that because screwing that up could be very bad.
If you have any problems, open an issue on GitHub (jennschiffer/make8bitart) or tweet at @jennschiffer. She's about to have time to work on stuff soon hopefully.
This article is pretty amazing in how poorly researched it is. I'm submitting this less as a piece of news and more as a piece of evidence of how dramatized a well-reasoned decision in open source can become.
That's good to know, thanks. -X doesn't work at all using the Raspberry Pi. If you have any insight, I'd love to figure out how to get it working with -X, but all my attempts are unsuccessful. Granted, I haven't spent too much time with X11 and its brethren since college.
No, I believe it's saying that any split that was not caused by a swollen battery is out-of-warranty. If it was caused by a swollen battery it would be eligible for an in-warranty repair.
To your point, the complexity of a SQL/PHP application is significantly smaller, but, the value proposition of Temporal is probably still there: If any part of the checkout process fails (e.g. charging the credit card, successfully triggering the order after they've charged the credit card, timing an email if there is an abandoned cart, handling the moving pieces of a return). These pieces are either handled manually by a human or you've got a decent amount of business logic in place to handle each of these edge cases individually.
The value-add of Temporal—in this case—would be that it would keep track of where the customer/order was in the overall flow of ordering something and pick up where it left off in the event that something went wrong.