Live data from Hacker News

Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com

221–230 of 1001 posts

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both your webpage and your docs are riddled with typos and the like. While it isn't indicative of code or project quality, it sure makes taking the project seriously a lot harder.

Well it depends on how much you have worked with a person who was still learning English. For me it highly depends on the kind of typos: - They're vs Their and similar normally denote uneducated native English speaker. The code might still be okay, but these typos passing to production makes me check code quality in case some similar QA mistakes are passed in the code. - Grammar mistakes normally show a foreigner for…

> They're vs Their and similar normally denote uneducated native English speaker.

in germany only grammar nazi's would actually hate such things. they are too common, to say that only uneducated people do it. people who write code and distribute code to the whole world are not writers, there is no need for "perfect" grammar and typos. i mean in my first application i've written quanity instead of quantity (inside the code), somehow it slipped in a lot of places, but i think many many people who will read the code would still understand it. as long as the user interface is checked, i think it's okay if the readme/documentation has typos or grammar mistakes (on open source projects). the most important thing is, is that people understand each other/understand what it's all about. which is just fine for nidium.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#222
post #13

If you like Node.js and HTML/CSS, just have a node daemon running in the background with an HTTP server to your app! It's just like Electron, but without the CPU/RAM/Battery usage. You can even have binaries that stay open after a double-click and automatically open your browser to localhost:40023 (or whatever).

That's horrible and are not native at all.

So it's basically no worse than Electron.

Seriously, if browsers supported an app:// URL which just ran a local site with special privileges and allowed for some custom branding Electron would be dead overnight.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#223
I love how the latest generation of interest in a particular development area like UI goes down the road of reinvention thanks to the latest in thing or programmer prejudice. The wasted bandwidth is insane.

Somebody needs to write a variation of Sisyphus that turns the boulder into UI development. Suggest not spreading this web dev lunacy onto desktop. The issue has already been solved with reasonable solutions for 25 years. Desktop development, automatic software updates, all that stuff.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#224
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. I simply have no interest in learning any native desktop programming and if I did it would be for my platform only and I wouldn't waste my time writing it for linux and definitely not for windows. I'd release what I had on github and move on. Now I can throw together a small (small by custom code sizes, I know electron is heavy) amount of code and get a cross platform app that doesn't look terrible…

> I simply have no interest in learning any native > […] programming And it is amazing to see how many bad reinventions of the wheel happens because of this. People claiming that writing electron app is 10x faster than native have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. The only think web-based tech will give you is ability to push out raw cross-platform prototype. Now try to polish that to the acceptable qua…

I am a web developer, I know that might be a dirty title in some circle but I really don't care. There are countless amazing things built on technology that people hate for whatever reason. PHP, JavaScript, and even Flash comes to mind. Guess what wins in the end? The thing that gets the job done quickest and easiest. It's one thing I really dislike about HN, the need to let everyone else know how terrible their decisions are because they didn't go as low level as the person posting the comment. "Oh you used PHP? Real programmers use C++" "Oh you used C++? Real programmers use C" "Oh you used C? Real programmers use assembly" "Oh you used assembly on a CPU? Real programmers design and build their own FPGA's for their code". Nothing is forcing you to use things built in electron so if it's so terrible then don't use it and move on with your life.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#225

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 can't speak for large companies trying to make the call on Electron versus multiple OS-specific apps, but for indie devs this is absolutely critical.

Imagine being a small shop of 1 person (or even 5) and having to learn desktop programming languages, conventions, and native APIs for the web, Mac, Windows, and Linux. Then on top of that to develop and maintain a product that moves at the pace of customer feedback.

That's why Electron is powerful. I could not write and maintain the Hemingway App for Mac and Windows without Electron. My tens of thousands of users would not get to use that software _at all_.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#226
I'm a big fan and total believer that deletion of few apps like Spotify, Slack and Atom could improve the performance of CPU. Recently I have been getting lags with my WebStorm for even firing up smallers commands like $ git status $ git log

I downloaded bunch of cpu profiler tools to observe how much CPU does spotify, slack and atom and also some other fancy react, electron app built apps take. Results are unbeliavale.....FYI: My Ram is 4GB with two 2GB slots. But after a complete cleanup and deletion of above troublesome apps performance is just amazing. I'm having a happy life with my WebStorm. I'm very positive that for my future node.js apps that is running nodemon would be fine too.

RIP Electron Family of Apps .

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The underlying issue here is that Electron reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development. Actually, the incentive is even stronger than this. The ability to visit a website and start using an identical version of the app immediately is just as important - I doubt that Slack and Discord would have had half the success they did if users had to download the application before using it, regardless of them…

Most people I know just the app though. Heck, I actually only discovered the Discord web client yesterday.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#228
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What you call "trade-offs" appears to me to be developers externalizing their costs onto users. There are costs to developing desktop applications and developers don't want to pay them, so they make users pay for them in wasted hardware dollars, bandwidth, RAM, battery life, and poor integration.

I don't disagree, but I'm hopeful that Electron will get better. When you choose an open source platform with a diverse group of major companies using it, part of what you are betting on is that the platform will a) survive for a reasonable amount of time and b) gradually improve.

GitHub, Slack, Spotify, Microsoft, etc., are all using Electron. As their developers gain experience with the platform and as they experience problems with resource usage, I would expect to see the platform improve. Maybe I'm wrong.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#229

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…

> Nobody 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 the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies.

Clearly Java never existed. I've been experimenting with Swing lately because Java has a library I'm interested in using. It's a breath of fresh air compared HTML/CSS/JS. It may not be proper "native" development, but I don't have to deal with hell. It has proper layout management instead of, what, 4 quirky CSS layout styles: float, table-, flex-, and now grid-. Sure if you want to hack something together, Electron may be quicker short term. But I question if it will actually be cheaper in the long run for non-trivial applications.

Post reply on HN