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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)

#231

Post by arca_vorago »

Andrex wrote: post #47

> I just ... don't care about your app enough to justify running more chrome instances Is the author going to uninstall Slack, Atom, Chrome, and Spotify, then? Electron has won out because key apps have opted to use it and decided that the trade-offs of user CPU and battery are worth some amount less than their productivity as developers. Yes, there are alternatives to developing native desktop apps in JavaScript (I'…

Jokes on you, I don't use any of those things in the first place!

One serious nitpick with you though. "Heavy web pages are heavy because they are multi-megabytes to download...) In my experience, heavy web pages are heavy because of the dozens of scripts being run on the pages, often based on bloated frameworks. Running uBlock and NoScript in advanced, I see it all, and I immediately think less of any site trying to load more than 3 scripts. Often I come across sites trying to run 20+. That's why the web is heavy today, not because the sites are huge to download.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#232

Post by pikzen »

positivecomment wrote: post #163
pikzen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the easier we can make it for electricians to wire up my house, the better, isn't it?" Unfortunately, no. Just as a trained electrician will wire up your house so as to not set it on fire as soon as you turn on a lamp, a trained developer will make apps that use a minimal amount of resources. Especially more hilarious if someone writing Electron apps call him/herself an engineer.

I write Electron apps and call myself an engineer, because I am an engineer. Could you please explain why am I being hilarious?

Have you been trained as an engineer, in a country where "engineer" is a very specific thing and is held to higher expectations, including the possibility of having your title taken away by your peers if you do not respect your duty to, first and foremost, your users and/or society, like every country that takes the title of engineer seriously?

If yes, what in earth makes you think writing Electron apps is a good idea? If no, back to my point.

To quickly answer JetJaguar below you, yes, I am an utter cunt, but being called a typical hackernews one hurts, considering how I can't stand most HNers.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#233

Post by maxsilver »

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…

> If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet

If developers weren't so scared of Swift and C#, this wouldn't be a problem.

> (writing Desktop apps) is 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.

I find the opposite to be almost universally true.

Writing a lightweight native desktop app is almost always cheaper than trying to build a JS-heavy app that has to run well in Mobile, and Tablets, and in a standard web browser, and in Electron fake-native-desktop web browser. Yes, you have separate projects with separate codebases. But two or three small lightweight projects is almost always cheaper than one big codebase with lots of targets, in terms of total cost of ownership.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#235

Post by ballenf »

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…

> ... Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications.

Is that true from a user's perspective? The average user I know would not have the idea that Slack is somehow inherently worse than say MS Word or any other truly native app they use everyday. What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac?

Slack starts up too fast for me to read the little quotation (penultimate Macbook Pro). I actually wish it was slightly slower because I like those cheesy quotes when I can catch them. Everything feels almost instant. Not bash instant, but as fast as any mainstream messaging app.

I leave it running all the time and get what feels like normal full hours upon hours of battery life. There are apps or browser tabs that I've noticed destroying battery life, but Slack nor Atom nor MS Visual code are on that list for me.

The anti-Electron complaints all kind of feel like the same argument that comes up as each new layer of abstraction gains acceptance. I'm sure there's a lot that Electron can and should improve. Running multiple copies of Chrome does sound awful, but until I read that I didn't know the atrocities it was committing.

Just doesn't feel productive to try to make Electron go away vs. working to improve it or create a better cross-platform abstraction.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#236

Post by arca_vorago »

zeveb wrote: post #154
Andrex wrote: post #47

> I just ... don't care about your app enough to justify running more chrome instances Is the author going to uninstall Slack, Atom, Chrome, and Spotify, then? Electron has won out because key apps have opted to use it and decided that the trade-offs of user CPU and battery are worth some amount less than their productivity as developers. Yes, there are alternatives to developing native desktop apps in JavaScript (I'…

> Is the author going to uninstall Slack, Atom, Chrome, and Spotify, then? I read Slack in emacs. I write code in emacs. I browse the web in emacs & Firefox. I play music via my phone's native Google Play Music client, although if I wanted to I could use emms, an emacs music-playing mode. I have no desire to run some GUI-only, CPU-hungry, memory-ravenous, of-the-moment JavaScript nightmare of a program. My productivi…

I find it interesting how many devs I have met in the last few years who seem so tied to GUI's... as a sysadmin who lives mostly on the cli, I never understood it.

Side note; many of said devs also used OSX instead of linux, maybe some correlation there.

Emacs is where it's at. Really, it's my main operating system. Email, org-mode, erc for IRC, RSS reader, editor, twitTER, eww (for some things like documentation), dired for folder management etc. Currently working on learning ledger.

"Using a free version of vi is not a sin but a penance."

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#238

Post by yesimahuman »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #201
yesimahuman wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Scrolling up involves network calls, so clearly it's going to be slower. Energy usage is definitely an area of improvement.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#239

Post by goatlover »

cpburns2009 wrote: post #229
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…

> 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…

Java isn't new and shiny anymore. Having been around for the great Java hype of the 90s, it's crazy that Javascript has now replaced it. Nobody would have predicted that back then.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#240

Post by kurinj »

I always thought Electron was a great idea, but it definitely seems like something that should only be used for prototyping.

There's some excellent software that uses it, but using the Chromium browser as a runtime is a dirty half-measure. I hope they're​ trying to pare it down in future releases and make an effort to utilize host-OS resources.

The less your code​ is doing, the better!

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