31–40 of 256 posts
I am on win10, on pretty hefty machines. No idea if it's because Electron or something else, but it's really annoying. I could not find any trace of issues in the event viewer etc.
I look at Electron apps the same way I used to look at Adobe Air apps. Any League of Legends player knows how bad the launcher is - 80% the fault of Adobe Air. Sure it was easier to build, but your users suffer for it. Electron apps are pretty terrible performance wise, and you can immediately tell it's an Electron app. - Atom - Slack - GitKraken All of these apps have 'tells'.
This had me for the first half, where the author walks you through the 'case study' applications that offer minimal functionality despite shipping with an entire browser inside. But then the essay turns into a rant. It's 2016, people, the ship has sailed on pretending JS isn't a real programming language. Phrasing the argument the way he does just betrays his smug elitism. The fact is, for many types of applications,…
I think the points raised are solid, but at this point it seems like Electron is the best worst solution for cross platform UI. Having worked with Qt I never wanna do that again. There's also a much more significant portion of developers who can work on Electron based apps. Part of picking the best tool for the job involves considering maintainability and ease of development after all.
I've had to work on PyQt5 at work, and was pleasantly surprised out how easy it was to hack up a full app.
All of this takes time. If you want to launch an app on multiple platforms, Electron is a very time efficient way to do this. Obviously native apps for every platform would be ideal but not everyone has the resources for that.
> Let me be clear about this: JavaScript sucks. It’s not the worst, but it’s also not by any means good. ES6 is a really great step forward and I’m thrilled about how much easier it’s going to be to write JavaScript, but it’s still JavaScript underneath the syntactic sugar.
Use something like Typescript or Flow then. The above is like saying C++ sucks because assembly is a bad language to code in.
If electron apps had a smarter way to manage chrome core as a dependency, the file size would be peanuts. Every apps is download on the same bundled core. Once this happens you won't have 100mb sizes. An intelligent installer could check core, if not installed download and install otherwise use what's on the system.
What if there was a centralized way of accessing HTML + CSS + JS applications? Instead of installing apps, you could just... "download" the necessary files to execute them? Perhaps even on demand from centralized.. "servers"?
I haven't seen many examples of people using Electron to make applications that really should be web apps instead, but more for packaging web apps with native enhancements. Often I'd prefer a "proper" native app, pushing even more features in the browser IHMO is not the answer.
If electron apps had a smarter way to manage chrome core as a dependency, the file size would be peanuts. Every apps is download on the same bundled core. Once this happens you won't have 100mb sizes. An intelligent installer could check core, if not installed download and install otherwise use what's on the system.
What if there was a centralized way of accessing HTML + CSS + JS applications? Instead of installing apps, you could just... "download" the necessary files to execute them? Perhaps even on demand from centralized.. "servers"?
There is. The major OSs provide APIs to access the platform browser. The downside is you need a platform specific shim to set this up using native code. So, developers need to step outside of their JS worldview for a few days to avoid that 200mb app size penalty.
If you are building a platform agnostic app then I understand the value of Electron to avoid that work across each platform. But, it seems several of those Electron apps aren't even platform agnostic, so why not build the platform specific shim and be a better citizen on my hardware.
edit: I'm daft
If electron apps had a smarter way to manage chrome core as a dependency, the file size would be peanuts. Every apps is download on the same bundled core. Once this happens you won't have 100mb sizes. An intelligent installer could check core, if not installed download and install otherwise use what's on the system.
Now that internet is everywhere, couldn't Electron:
1) Setup a common bootstrap mechanism so it's version agnostic 2) Check for the declared version of the app 3) If online (and allowed by system policy) check if there are security issues, or updates for the needed version 4) Advise user where to download the update, or (again, if allowed by policy) allow the user the proceed with the installation?
With some magic to allow a 'side-by-side' distribution of the Electron runtime, on good-ol' durable media, wouldn't this go far to minimize the size of the distributions of these Electron apps? You could have a system with one (or more if nessecary) versions of the runtime, and multiple apps using that runtime (with isolated profiles, of course ...)
Why is this garbage on the front page? Stop giving condescending people like this a platform.
See, I totally agree with this essay. But what are the alternatives? Getting started with Qt/GTK isn't nearly as easy, for example. Maybe someone should write an intro to native GUI programming for JS devs.
import sys
from PyQt4 import QtGui
def window():
app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
w = QtGui.QWidget()
b = QtGui.QLabel(w)
b.setText("Hello World!")
w.setGeometry(100,100,200,50)
b.move(50,20)
w.setWindowTitle(“PyQt”)
w.show()
sys.exit(app.exec_())
if __name__ == '__main__':
window()