I just noticed this morning that VSCode has started causing my MBP's fans to spin up whenever I type in it. I spent about an hour updating my MacVim setup to replace it.
Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
51–60 of 1001 posts
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#52You'd think they'd afford a Mac & windows developer.....
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#53A lot of Slack's high (background) CPU usage is caused by GIFs, in my experience. Just did a quick check on my quadcore MBP, having Slack fullscreen out-of-view with nothing animated in view gives it a CPU usage of 0,1% with spikes up to 2,5%. Switch to a conversation with a single animated party parrot emoji, go to another fullscreen app once again, and CPU usage never drops below a whopping 22%. For an animated par…
> A lot of Slack's high (background) CPU usage is caused by GIFs, in my experience.
Holy fuck, can you imagine the supercomputers that were required to display Geocities websites in the 1990s?
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#54Long time javascript programmers are the loser (if they never learned more than javascript) they don't know how to programming an almost perfect program. That is the reason why they using javascript on Desktop. The average programmer learns just one fucking language but being a good programmer you need at least to learn 2+ languages. That you can see the performance issues in your stack. I started with PHP and javascript while this time I didn't care about performance and now I'm a c/golang programmer. When I started to study c and golang I just released how bad the whole javascript stuff is actually.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#55Why would a tech company not build its flagship product natively on the platforms where it runs? It seems like a generation drift: an obliviousness to the world outside of JS/web dev, and a general disregard for application performance.
Put simply: time to market. Experienced front-end devs with a designer on hand could put together the UI inside of a day, with a workable user experience.
Hell, if you're not afraid of bloating in the codebase, you could use a large number of libraries to put together a basic, working version inside of a day or two. Stretch that to a couple of weeks (at most) and you have a prototype you can release.
The proof is in Atlassian and Microsoft chasing after Slack on this. Very few people came forward to wave the "Let's just go back to IRC" flag.
It's shiny, new, you can drag and drop gifs and files into it, and it runs pretty swiftly (ignoring all of the obvious flaws). Most, especially less technical, users would find it a charm to work with. In my experience, they do -- and above all of the competitors.
The rest of your points are rather valid. But maybe its not so much obliviousness, as eagerness and impatience, and the reality of the market being as timely and pressing as it currently is. It's a race -- just like the telephone and the radio (for my point I'm ignoring the scale of impact here).
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#56Very timely article. But I have been told to shut up and use Atom/VSCode/Slack like everyone else and upgrade hardware if software runs slow. I find memory/cpu efficient applications not just useful but respectful to users specially when upgrading hardware is not possible due to financial or policy reasons.
We're also in an era when the speed of laptop and desktop CPUs has essentially stalled. Put another way, if our apps hog more resources there aren't necessarily faster machines we can buy.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#57I've been working on a hobby app for some years that is a modern refresh of an old idea. As the article exhorts (and just for funsies, it's just a hobby) I'm writing it using native code and to be conservative on resources. Every place I need to render text or make a thing respond to a mouse click I need to manually do all my own text layout and event handling and so on. (The app is in a domain where it needs special…
Well, the question is: Does your app run always like a daemon or just when you actually need it?
It can be fine to prototype in Electron, or to make tools in it. But if you're making a chat program or anything similarly long-lived, it's the worst decision you can make for your user.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#58> Also all you web devs: Go learn C or Rust or something. Your program runs on a computer. Until you know how that computer works, you're doomed.
I can only encourage everyone to heed this advice.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#59Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#60Meanwhile, we're still waiting for those "pro-native" people to give us better user experience. I agree that Electron has its issue like having multiple copies of Chromium (and not Google Chrome). Obviously native apps are better overall, but only if they provide a better UX. Being a vscode user, I don't know which native editor provides the same UX.
Emacs provides a better UX, Visual Studio (proper) provides a better UX, Sublime provides something close, although not as good. Slack's UX is incredibly basic. It's a couple of steps above a basic CRUD app. There are billions of IRC and XMPP clients ranging from toy to professional-quality, I use IRSSI, which is admittedly basic, but I find it hard to believe that there is no better native chat UX in existence than Slack's.