For today and tomorrow, Embarcadero has helped organize the first edition of a very interesting free online conference, called " Desktop First UX Summit ". The overall focus of the event is to underline that desktop UI and UX should not just clone the web and mobile ones, but developers should use all of the power of the desktop platforms and create specific user experiences optimized for desktop users. As you know, mobile first has become common, but it is not always the right approach.

As part of this conference, I'm giving a session that is not focused strictly on UX but on applications architectures. I'm going to discusss the (worrisome) growth in the use of web technologies for building desktop applications. Beside the UI and UX implications (apps on Windows don't look and feel to be Windows any more) there are very significant issues related with the approach, which is mostly driven by the popular Electron framework:

- the memory consumption of applications (with small utility apps using hundreds of MB of RAM)

- the download and deployment size

- the security risks of relying on multiple third party engines embedded in and deployed with the solution

- the overall user experience

- but also the overall development experience

While I won't go deeper on all of these areas, I'll touch on some of them at high level. We really need to ask ourselves why we are ending up in this direction. I remember the complaints for the size of a Delphi app, which now compares to something*100 times bigger! Anyway, enjoy the session (or a replay) and join us for one of the live panels happening today and tomorrow at the conference. I'm scheduled for Panel#3 tomorrow, but might be able to join a few others.

In the coming days, I'll do another blog post with some more links and information, as I don't want to spoil the session content!



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