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Desktop applications are the backbone of global businesses. We can not think about the future without desktop programs. It is the playground, where many of us played our first game and wrote our first line of code. Microsoft Windows, still arguably the dominant desktop operating system, is the place people go to build, connect, learn, design, and achieve many things.
Over a billion people today rely on desktop programs, from playing games with friends to implement billion-dollar ideas into reality.
Frequently, engineers choose to create applications for smartphones only believing that mobile devices represent the direction that application use is heading towards with users preferring them over traditional desktop devices. But, giving lie to this belief, in the last 3-5 years there has actually been a huge rise in the desktop application industry.
It has been a more common design strategy that companies have tried to build single-page applications which run in a web browser. This choice theoretically means users do not need a static personal computer but can turn to smartphones or tablets to utilize those apps. However, with some real-world usage it's often found to be a less rich and satisfactory user experience with compromises made to fit the mobile paradigm for anything other than less feature-complete offerings. In reality, for a full power experience unfettered by trying to fit everything into a mobile device's limitations there is no perfect replacement for desktop applications.
Furthermore, I have seen several developers in a tech conference saying that it is hard to maintain deployed desktop apps and keep them running on modern versions of the operating system. I find it quite hard to believe this opinion. For instance, there are thousands of desktop apps originally designed in the 2000s which remain compatible with Windows 11. Even the user interface controls are compatible with the latest Windows 11 style.
Besides, we see someone on the social network who built his/her app with new web technology that gives the appearance of working like a desktop app and also remains responsive for use on smartphones. But these kinds of progressive web apps can only use a superset of the actual features of each device, desktop or mobile. Even with careful programming the eventual delivered product can only use a restricted superset of the available features for the hardware since they must work at the level of the highest common denominator – screens that adapt, yes, but no use of the specific capabilities of the hardware since it can't be guaranteed something like an accurate GPS locator is available. This extends to even something quite simple and ever-present on a mobile device: a camera – many desktops do not have them and, when they do, they may not work at all like the mobile version.
If a particular must-have feature is limited or missing for an entertainment or social media app it is inconvenient and frustrating but for a business-focussed app it can be a total show-stopper which prevents sales or causes actual harm to your customer's business especially if that limitation is discovered late in the adoption of the application into the business processes.
Several years ago, Microsoft decided to begin revitalizing its engineering system across the company.
Microsoft has been trying to create an environment for its Windows engineers which helps them to create, build and release new versions of Windows faster. One of these changes was for the Microsoft Windows development team to adopt Git as their chosen code repository host, and it's one of, if not the largest, known projects using Git.
The Windows codebase is about 3.5 million files and when checked into Git results in a huge 'repo' of approximately 300GB. Moreover, the Windows team comprises around 4,000 engineers and this engineering team produces an incredible 1,700+ daily lab builds across 440 branches with thousands of pull request validation builds. It's a huge software engineering undertaking.
Microsoft's first and largest jump happened on March 22nd when they rolled out the Windows OneCore team (which was about 2,000 engineers) to the Git version control system. 2,000 engineers went home for the weekend and came back Monday morning to a new experience based on Git. The windows team had done a great job preparing for problems and the need to revert changes, but because of the successful rollout, everything transferred flawlessly. It was a massive engineering and planning feat, entirely focussed on a desktop operating system which they clearly intended would remain a central focus of their business strategy.
From this, we can see that Microsoft is investing substantially in what they apparently see as their big product – Windows. This challenging transition is a big endorsement of desktop programs' future.
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Windows' core strength is helping users increase efficiency by offering the flexibility of multiple application windows. This intent extends further in Windows 11 with addition of features that make it easier to arrange application windows using 'layouts' to fit more efficiently across the wide screen, high resolution, multi-monitor desktops that are used in virtually every single home and business. Snap Groups and Virtual Desktops provide even more multitasking ability and higher productivity, especially for 'power users', a category of computer user which has arisen as desktop computers inveigled their way into the very fabric of how we work and play.
Microsoft Windows is still a very popular operating system for gamers despite the availability and popularity of alternatives such as dedicated games consoles. Today, hundreds of millions of people around the globe game and entertain with friends on Windows.
The modern environment of much more affordable and widely available high resolution computer monitors spurred on a secondary industry which created super-powerful graphics cards to relieve the CPU of the onerous task of driving the many millions of pixels and huge rafts of graphical data demanded by things such as 4K movies, HDR and realistic light shading. Those graphics processors in turn gave rise to software technologies to keep them spewing out polygons and rendering crisp fonts.
Our apps now live in a computing world where users may have more than one computer screen attached to their desktop device and those screens might well have different pixel resolutions, color capabilities, even physical dimensions such as 'portrait' orientations thanks to brackets that upend the rectangular screen so it is taller rather than wide.
All these new features demand a software development tool which can both understand and drive them. Tools like Embarcadero RAD Studio. With RAD Studio, you can create native programs that are able to directly access all the available features in the operating system.
RAD Studio is an amazing environment to build desktop-first programs. RAD Studio has two major frameworks:
When we use the term 'native' it means that RAD Studio creates applications which are not going through some kind of runtime layer such as Electron, Java or Node to run but, instead, are fully compiled down to the lowest possible level, as 'close to the metal' as possible. It's an important differentiation and makes a huge difference to reliability, performance and removes almost entirely any form of dependence on other technologies to make the application run.
RAD Studio's Visual Component Library is very comprehensive and provides a wide variety of flexibility compared to any other Desktop development library or framework. The VCL continues to have full integration even with the very latest Windows 11 environment. The VCL also supports productivity enhancing features like hotkeys, accessibility, multi-monitor, multi-resolution and high DPI.
FireMonkey, also included in RAD Studio, is a comprehensive framework for creating desktop applications for Windows, macOS, and Linux (plus iOS and Android).
Several years ago, Microsoft launched Windows 8 which aimed to be a Universal Windows Platform which would support apps that could run on phones, tablets, PCs, and even – or perhaps especially – Xbox consoles. Microsoft spent years pushing developers to the UWP. Along with this push Microsoft launched the Windows app store as a universal and curated way for developers to release their applications to the public.
Embarcadero implemented a desktop bridge for the VCL so you can deploy your VCL apps to the Microsoft Store this way. Windows Phone, based on Windows 8 and the primary driver for UWP and the Windows store, failed to enjoy success and was eventually dropped. This and other concerns, like low level of customization, encouraged Microsoft to choose a new mantra which said: "Go native".
Developers love Win32 apps so much because of their high-level flexibility on Windows systems. Moreover, VCL calls Win32 APIs directly with maximum efficiency and compatibility with Windows updates. The VCL 'plays by the rules' and uses the Windows API in ways which ensure that new Windows versions do not impact on your application due to using undocumented or 'tricky' api calls.
The VCL gives you system-related components like:
These are really helpful if you are building modern Windows 11 programs.
When choosing to use the FireMonkey cross-platform library the range of opportunities for developers extends to other targets beyond Microsoft Windows. With only a single code base you can safely create apps for all major platforms with less coding effort. Besides, your FireMonkey cross-platform apps can utilize all the platform-related APIs directly should you choose to do so, and with the platform-aware and native platform UI controls you can design complex user interfaces in no time.
With either framework, VCL or FireMonkey, these frameworks and libraries have access to the Microsoft Store and platform-related functionalities.
Why not JavaScript desktop apps?
With JavaScript, you always need to keep updating all of your artifacts to create a new stable build. Moreover, the problems with web applications are well known.
JavaScript is popularly used, but quality, security, performance, and platform integration are a bottleneck. These problems are already solved in other technologies like Delphi and C++.
In desktop development, you can have more mature tech stacks and uniqueness because of so much opportunity.
If your product features significant data interaction, inserting and analyzing data, then the desktop-first approach can solve problems. Why? Because there is always high productivity and easy user experience since there is a bigger screen size, often with better system resources, connectivity, and reliability of that connection too.
Desktop applications are a solid foundation on which we integrate our lives and our work. It's where we conquer problems, it's where we learn, work and play. Mobile devices are a useful enhancement to that productivity – but not the best choice as the primary location for computing activity on a day-to-day basis.
In the above article, we have discussed the future of desktop applications and available technologies to design and build desktop apps.
If you are interested in more information about the best ways to build productive desktop applications there is a free online conference you should attend.
The Desktop First UX Summit 2021 is offering free tickets right now and is a great way to learn all the latest tips and tricks of desktop software development.
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