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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com

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Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#201

Post by matthewmacleod »

yesimahuman wrote: post #175
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify, Slack and Atom are no longer hip startups though - they're established applications, and at least two of them have a very lucrative monthly subscription model. They can afford to optimize.

But the user experience is already great, so what's the gain? Electron and the web clearly make a first class app platform on desktop. EDIT: thanks for the downvotes. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how electron is keeping Slack and Spotify from building a massive business and how their desktop users find the experience so bad they don't use the tools obsessively. Clearly there are things to improve w/ Electron (en…

The user experience of Slack as a desktop app is not great. The UI is consistently one of the highest energy users on my machine, despite being one of the worst performing (have you ever tried scrolling up into a conversation's history?)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#202

Post by goatlover »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

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…

Wasn't this basically true of Java in 1995? Everyone was excited about finally being able to easily write cross platform apps. And then there was flash that anyone willing to pay for the designer could build apps that could run on any platform. So now we're on to the third thing.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#203

Post by douche »

I'm surprised to see so little mention of Java as a cross-platform native app platform. Maybe I'm just old enough to remember coming up though when Swing and AWT were the next big thing. Nowadays, IntelliJ and it's derivatives are all Java-based, and pretty popular and performant.

I love getting a chance to get out of web-dev world and go build some ugly tools with WinForms from time to time. You have to do more work yourself, but there's so much less magic involved.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#204

Post by [deleted] »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #97
anaisbetts wrote: post #74

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…

That's nonsense . Desktop apps have been frequently released since forever. The underlying issue here is that Electron reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development . That is, it's cheaper to build a single cross-platform application in Electron than it is to build two or three native applications, and you can re-use your existing web experience. I can completely understand why companies might choose th…

[deleted]

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#205

Post by arca_vorago »

tempodox wrote: post #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.

Maybe time to ressurect my abandoned wxwidgets inspired assembly project?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#207

Post by jjtheblunt »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

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…

Bologna: nothing truly performant uses Javascript because Javascript can't get at hardware accelerators in their full glory. Apple's macOS and iOS are themselves desktop apps, in the latter case for a pocketable desktop, and they resolutely don't rely on the very constrained subset of 50 years of engineering called Javascript.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#208

Post by treehau5 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #97
anaisbetts wrote: post #74

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…

That's nonsense . Desktop apps have been frequently released since forever. The underlying issue here is that Electron reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development . That is, it's cheaper to build a single cross-platform application in Electron than it is to build two or three native applications, and you can re-use your existing web experience. I can completely understand why companies might choose th…

> That's nonsense.

Proper this and proper that, and don't get me wrong, I agree, but parent is correct -- and that is these apps wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Electron. It just wouldn't have been a consideration for it to be a desktop app. Instead it would have just been thrown up on the web. For example VSCode would have just been some type of online IDE clone like Cloud9 or something similar.

If you think this is nonsense, you are out of touch, and I don't mean this as an insult, although I realize there isn't a good way to say that.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#209

Post by ryandrake »

I have a couple of hobby desktop (macOS) applications in various stages of done-ness, which, if there were a low-effort solution, I'd like to port to Windows. Yet even with the business logic nicely separated out into portable C++, it's a huge pain. In the 10 or so years since I've done Windows, the development environment on that platform became totally foreign. C++/MFC seems to be dead and buried, now we have WPF (which is also going away if I'm reading things right) and C# and XAML and Windows Universal and all these layers of exotic technology I now need to learn and master just to get a simple native looking port of this thing. Screw that, I'll find something else to work on thankyouverymuch.

I totally see the pain and the burning need out there for a way to write something that works across the "big three" platforms that have grown more and more distant from each other over the years. But Javascript and a browser? Really, that's the answer? I'd even be willing to toss out my investment in Objective-C native code on macOS if I could keep my C++ business logic. Is Qt really viable? My understanding (again, maybe dated) is that a Qt application looks like a Qt application, not a native application. Is this still true?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#210

Post by jscholes »

People grew up and stopped using Flash, slowly phasing it out. If Electron is as influencial as some comments here seem to think it is, the big players in the desktop market will (hopefully) step up and put together new APIs and tools which fill the gap Electron is currently filling. And they'll do it all natively and without the terrible bloat, poor productivity and bad accessibility that Electron currently brings to the party.
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