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Native desktop apps are far superior to Web/Electron

I’ve been using computers for over 2 decades now. My first PC was a 66 Mhz 486 machine with a 2.4 kbps modem and the web did not even have Google ( We had Altavista ). Since the internet was slow, I spent most of my time with Applications that could be installed on my local machine. Now I spend most of my time on web applications and somehow it feels like we have moved backward rather than moving forward. Memory Usage A few years ago while trying to figure out why I was running out of RAM, I stumbled upon chrome’s task manager. Gmail was using up 700MB of RAM and all I had open was the Inbox. No fancy search box or Compose, the Inbox was taking up 700MB of RAM to display lines of text in a Tabular format. I’ve been a heavy user of Email clients and if you pick any of the native clients (Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail) and open a bunch of searches and compose windows the memory usage will still stay below 100MB.   I used mIRC a few decades ago to connect to multi...
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Google Stadia should've used Windows instead of Linux

Google stadia was launched a few months ago to much fanfare. It promised 4k streaming on the Pro version, a great collection of games and streaming provided by Google's vast data center network. But the launch wasn't exactly smooth. Stadia was initially going to launch with a collection of 12 games  , which had a lot of people complaining. PS4 has 2441 games in comparison with Xbox one clocking in at 2361 games in comparison ( 3200+ if you also include the backward compatibility games from Xbox 360). Now Stadia's founder edition wasn't exactly cheap at 129$ and required a monthly subscription of 10$ to play games. You can buy a brand new Xbox One S for 149$ in comparison. Google was quickly forced to revise it's launch lineup and added 10 games just before launch to its arsenal. Critics weren't very impressed though and reviews were lacklustre at best. Games did not run at the promised 4k resolution and in many cases were upscaled . Lobbies for multiplayer gam...

How to solve missing push notifications in Android

Android is the most popular mobile operating system now with more than 76% market share. This has, in part, been possible due to its open nature and the multiple vendors which ship Android on their devices. But it also has huge problems in terms of fragmentation. For e.g Android Oreo was released in August 2017 and iOS 11 was released in September 2017, Oreo has 14.2% market adoption and iOS 11 has 85% even though Oreo had a headstart. To get to 85% adoption, you need to target  Android  Kitkat which was released in Oct 2013. Though this is only the tip of the iceberg. Missing Notifications I was the lead for Flock Android, a team messaging app which competes with the likes of Slack. We started receiving some weird complaints from users about missing notifications. Now since it was a business messaging app, notifications were critical. We tried out everything to reproduce this issue, including bombarding devices with notifications using test scripts, trying out different...

Why I’d never subscribe to Google Stadia

Google stadia is due for release soon and having been a gamer for 20 years I was really interested in it. But the more I read about Stadia, the less interested I become. My primary machine to play games is an Xbox One which I purchased 4 years ago. It has started showing its age and I’m anxiously waiting for the next-gen consoles which are due to arrive next year. I was primarily exploring stadia as a temporary gaming device which I could use before getting a next-gen console, but gave up on the thought after reading more. Lack of popular multiplayer games I mostly play multiplayer games and so do most of my friends who are gamers. Apex Legends, Fortnite, PUBG, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Halo etc. These games also happen to be the most streamed games on Twitch. While there are certain single-player titles that make it to the top 10 streamed games on twitch, it’s usually short-lived. Stadia supports none of them. Would you really buy a console today, or purchase one on E...