The Pixel-perfect Application

For 20 years at least, I hear people preach about how the web-apps will take over the world, and there is no reason to have anything else, but only a browser.

Chromebooks were (and still are) the incarnation of that. More or less, they are full blown computers running web-based applications only. Alas, there is a sad reality around web applications. They work great, but they cannot really interconnect, at least in a programmatically efficient manner with the operating system and/or other applications. In addition, their performance is bad. They require lots of memory (browsers are not optimized on these areas).

On the other side, the web frameworks (front-end like react etc) can provide easily, a beautiful result. Even simple graphs created to enrich reports and dashboards can easily be aesthetically pleasing for the end-user. It was the truth, until the late 00s, the experience you could provide to the end-users through web applications, was unmatched. Even now, desktop applications, are somehow bound to all those old-skool components, buttons, radio-buttons etc.

Around 2011 (at least for me), I began to hear buzzwords like “pixel-perfect design”. Back then, I did not understood it, but that was the revenge of the desktop apps. They had returned as mobile phone applications. The good ones, have unmatched user experience, with everything in place, aesthetics, transitions and fully integration with the operating system and other apps, exploiting the full potential of each mobile device. And they are produced in large number, thus the existing frameworks are designed to be used easily by literally anyone.

Web technologies tried to compete on that space, but they ended as a cheap alternatives, if you don’t want to invest on native applications.

But still, on desktop computers, the apps you find, are a bit backwards. Maybe, instead of writing electron apps, we should understand the principles applied on the mobile world, and create really great desktop apps. I would really love to see all these ideas, applied ona large screen.