101–110 of 1001 posts
Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…
Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…
I would acutally pay Spotify extra money if they brought back the old, snappy, pre-Electron version of their Windows desktop app.
They replaced it with something that is simply too heavy to manage larger playlists (except maybe on the max-spec MBPs it's being coded on) just because they could iterate more quickly on some non-essential features which they might have packed inside a WebView, leaving essential features intact and responsive.
> If you want to use JS and react to make a native app, try react native instead. Given the discussion of the recent ReactXP thread, I'm guessing most people don't realize you can do this today . React Native supports macOS [1] and UWP [2]. Edit: There's even some early work on Ubuntu support [3]. [1] https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows [3] https://github.c…
I'm probably in that camp too, I thought it was just for android and iOS still (even though I consider myself to keep up to date with these types of things). Do you know if they have anything for linux yet?
A 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…
Post author here. I thought about that, but there weren't any visible animations playing when I took those measurements. And the 5% figure survived a restart of the client. Its possible there were gifs playing above-the-fold somewhere and reloading themselves, but if so I'd say thats a bug somewhere in the interaction between the 15-20M lines of code in slack, electron and chrome. Its also worth noting that blog post…
FWIW, we're working on https://github.com/nidium/Nidium presicely to fix this. A new kind of browser engine, not based on any existing engine, allowing developers to use a subset of the web (webgl, 2d, layout) without being forced to use a bloated ecosystem (and which also works on mobile and low end device). Previous HN discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314961
Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…
Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…
Why 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.
because they don't need to. Our phones and computers aren't where they were 10~15 years ago. The end user doesn't even notice if an app is native or running in Electron. Given that constraint, time to market becomes crucial as the huge cross platform barrier is significantly reduced by Electron. It's also a demographic shift. Young developer's aren't coding in Java peak world anymore. We haven't even reached peak Jav…
Telegram Desktop is very good example of modern desktop client done in the most efficient way. C++ and qt, nothing else. Works like a charm an all major operating systems. Easy to install, use and update. Great stuff.
How do they manage to get the very native feel to the UI on Telegram for MacOS? Or is that a different native client? Also curious… in what language and UI framework is their iOS client written?
I'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…