When I complain about a lack of “native” software I pretty much always mean the platform-provided defaults. Not some cross-plaform UI toolkit that happens to be “native” code. Most apps that I see using QT on Mac or whatever would provably be better as Tauri apps.
I like the 32 bit era because it's the only time we had symmetrical data and address buses. 32 bit data bus on chip. 32 bit addressable RAM, 4 GB. Used to be 8/16 and now it's 64/whatever. Understandable decisions given needs/constraints but sort of messy.
I've use Claude to make myself a number of little tools and weird apps that only I would want lately. They need to be cross-platform between Linux and Mac and sometimes Windows. The best approaches I've found are Tauri (+Svelte for making layout easier) for lightweight GUIs but for anything more complex I prefer a TUI. The Ratatui framework works very well. A TUI feels like a "real" app as opposed to a glorified webpage. For actually serious software I'd want a native GUI on each platform.
There are so many options for what you describe. E.g. the whole point of Tcl/Tk is to allow easy creation of small little tools and apps. And you can use Tk with Python as well.
A TUI app feels like a native terminal app like I have used for my entire computing life, in DOS and then Linux. Electron apps feel like web apps no matter how good they are. I stopped using 1Password when it became an Electron app and became super janky. Discord, Slack, VS Code, the Signal desktop app, all suck UI-wise compared to actual native Mac apps, which even with Liquid Ass, are still better than using web technology for desktop apps. I know that lowest common denominator cross platform apps make economic sense to develop, whatever. They still suck to use.
No. Good TUI apps are predictable and fast, like good native GUI apps. They follow set patterns. Familiarity and following standard conventions is not just "nostalgia" -- maybe a little is in there -- but it makes apps more usable. And, for cross-platform apps, it's a cross-platform standard. I'd rather have a TUI app following TUI conventions than a cross-platform app that is just a freeform mish-mash. Like, this week I've been making a TUI replacement for Plexamp which has great features but its Mac app is just like a scrolling webpage. If I am going to have a GUI app that is more than a tiny toy or utility I want it to follow each platform's native conventions and use its native GUI components or to not even bother. I will grant that Electron has made strides in terms of properly integrating into each host OS (using the full Mac menu bar, the correct keyboard shortcuts, accessibility features and so on) so the situation is not as bad as it once was. And also, plenty of people use and have used terminal editors and other tools by choice, for years, and not just because they are connecting to remote servers. A keyboard-first interface can be quite fast and they are more natural in TUIs.
I think it looks better (on Mac and iOS) than any other Liquid Glass app. And I can’t blame Brent for adopting it. One of the standout features of the app is just being native, not trying to re-invent the wheel with custom GUI, and taking advantage of built-in platform features.
My favorite NNW feature is iCloud syncing: Not needing a separate RSS back-end (but of course you can use one if you want to sync with other clients).
> think it looks better (on Mac and iOS) than any other Liquid Glass app
what a weird comparison, the baseline is the previous version of the app
> standout features of the app is just being native, not trying to re-invent the wheel with custom GUI, and taking advantage of built-in platform features
Since the previous GUI isn't custom you don't lose your standout features
Yes, because it means that as Liquid Glass improves with Alan Dye out the door, NNW will automatically benefit from the improvements. Having an app that just follows the current standard native platform conventions is better for users and leads to apps that behave in a predicable way.
Doesn't make sense, the improvements can still be worse than pre-glass, and it's not guaranteed they will be better. Also, what's the rush, why not implement it after it's improved?
The predictability is the opposite - you've changed design, breaking predictable patterns. Also, cutting off users can't be better for users
If you say that air isn’t “really” blue because the reason it is blue is different than the reason that other things are blue (e.g. most blue things in daily life absorb frequencies other than blue), this is equivalent to saying that birds with blue feathers due to structural coloration—where instead of pigment, microscopic structures interfere with light—don’t “really” have blue feathers.
This is just silly. Some birds have blue feathers. There are various ways to be blue. Similarly, air is blue.
If something appears blue, it is blue. That’s all color is.
Also, if you took a sufficiently large quantity of air and put it into empty space and shined very bright white through it, it would experience rayleigh scattering—-meaning that air, when you have enough of it and shine a bright enough light through it, is blue.
By that logic the sky is near-Planck length ultraviolet, because if I put a sufficiently large quantity of it immediately beside a supernova it goes way past blue.
Color is a property something has under certain conditions, it is not a property of what that something is under all conditions.
Yes, I came here to say this. The whole topic drives me crazy. Air is just blue. Everything is a color because of some physics reason. Some birds have blue wings due to microscopic structures and how light interacts with them, rather than pigment.
If you took a large column of air into space and shined white light through it, it would be blue.
No, it would look red. The weird thing about air is that it's not reflection or absorption that gives the color, but scattering, and that means the color is strongly dependent on what direction you are looking at it from in a way that most transparent mediums aren't.
Ok, so the air would be red from one angle, blue from another. In each case, that is what color the air “really” is, in the same sense that a butterfly’s wings are blue (but not from every angle)
Except that one is transmissive and the other reflective. They're not the same kind of thing. TBH I feel like a demo like this is the only way to get an intuitive feel for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xx7sPPTu3Y .
(I agree that just going on about Rayleigh scattering is probably overly obtuse: at least not without explaining that scattering is part of how color is formed in the first place. But it's also not just a case of 'well air is blue like apple juice is orange')
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