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Discussion on: Which computer era would have been the most exciting to take part in?

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

Desktop apps era (before smart phones).

It was just so much easier to write/ship desktop apps.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

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Ross Henderson

I'd love to go to that event as a time-traveller. To just sit in the back and watch, preferably with popcorn.

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Tim Smith

Look at those weird old dudes partying 🎉

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Glenn Stovall

But much harder to fix bugs. You can't ship an update when your software is shrinkwrapped and sitting on a shelf at Circuit City.

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Yaser Al-Najjar

Absolutely true... There was no dev ops thing on those days 😁

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Jaaki • Edited

Yes, you never had to worry about how things got displayed on different screen size too.

I remember the first Touch Screen application I wrote.
It had to run on this old school CRT display, super high tech at the time.
It was strange to make the buttons so big that you could touch them with your fingers!! [weirdness]

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Yaser Al-Najjar

Different screen sizes... ughh!

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Jaaki

I know right. Let's start a movement.

Every should use the same screen!

:D

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Ian Pride

I didn't know the Desktop Apps era was over (not being sarcastic & don't mean anything bad by that statement). The majority of my favorite tools are still well maintained regular programs. I understand there's a large world of new languages and apps out there, but I will not convert to them until they can be fully automated. I mean FULLY. Good thing I no longer make a living with computers (well, I do make a little, but not my main income) and only as a hobby now. And even on my Android devices I try to do as much as I can with scripts and a terminal.

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Yaser Al-Najjar

Most apps now are either web or mobile.

If you wanna make a living from developing desktop apps, you can only do so by joining big companies that dominated the market long ago like Adobe, AutoDesk... etc.

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Lukáš Doležal

operating systems, developer tools, web browsers... are still also desktop apps :D

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Yaser Al-Najjar

Be honest with yourself and think: can you make money on those?

Most dev tools are free.

OSs and desktop apps who make money are owned by the big companies that I mentioned before.

As an indie developer, it's just much harder to make money building desktop apps these days.

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Lukáš Doležal

Oh 100%. I did not think about making money on those.

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Lukáš Doležal

Tho. There is still room for innovative desktop software. For example I can imagine software development tools (that add some value on top of just being cool text editor), will be huge thing in couple of years. They are right now commercial IDEs but they don't do much more. When AI gets in, it will be huge deal. But yes, not easy.

Anything where you need low latency and high (but not supercomputer-like) performance and/or work offline is still good for desktop. Tho it may also change (even tho, it will most likely be desktop apps streaming, like we can see with games already).