[diegomacario]

Hey mike, I'm the Diego, the person who wrote this blog post and implemented the majority of it. Reading this comment, I feel the need to challenge some of your assumptions. I don't expect to change your mind, but here's my take on this:

- I have only been a developer for 7 years, and I don't have a degree in Software Engineering. I actually studied electrical engineering and upon graduating I landed my first job writing device drivers for graphics cards, which got me started writing software professionally.

- I did that for 3 years, and after discovering a passion for computer graphics I worked at Autodesk for 3 years on a desktop application called 3ds Max.

- After all those years working on that old and heavy desktop application I started seeing web-based applications like Figma as the right way to do things. Nothing beats the convenience of opening a link to launch an app, and of being able to launch an app on any device. That's why I joined Shopify's Spatial Commerce Team.

- My favorite programming language is C++, and the demos you see in the blog post are written in C++. I developed them as desktop applications, and compiled them to WebAssembly using Emscripten.

- I have never done "resume driven development." I studied computer graphics as a hobby for years because of a deep interest in it, and I was poorly paid all those years.

Thanks for your time.

[mike_hearn]

Thank you for your reply and I apologise if you feel offended. I was trying to summarise many experiences I've had over the years in one place and for sure, it sounds like what I've seen before doesn't apply to you.

To give a couple of examples, I've had someone tell me that they'd rather buy every dev who signs up for their platform (for free) a new iPhone, rather than write a desktop app to let them manage their API keys. I also worked on Bitcoin for a while and had to warn people that their users would lose large sums of money in avoidable ways if they implemented their idea as a web app, I was ignored because I was assured nobody downloads desktop apps anymore, and then people lost large sums of money in exactly the ways predicted. Note that Bitcoin itself was a Windows-only desktop app! This sort of thing is what I was thinking of.

Still, I'd ask you to reconsider the conclusions of your project. Yes it would of course be convenient to have it all run as a web app, but the alternative you faced wasn't a tradeoff between something more convenient and something less, it was between something a bit less convenient (albeit same number of clicks in many cases) or, apparently, nothing at all.

You clearly have the skills to try again with an alternative approach that runs outside the browser. It would be a cool feature, and even if in the end you conclude without being in-browser it's not convenient enough, it would be interesting to learn how users reacted in usability studies. I spend my time trying to make the desktop app UX as fast and smooth as possible, and if Shopify are up for the challenge then I'd be happy to work with you guys to try and build the most optimal UX possible for this project. Not every EXE is Autodesk! This kind of problem is exactly why I quit my job to make a new product for shipping desktop apps. Projects like this one don't have to wither on the vine.