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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)

#281

Post by qeternity »

d--b wrote: post #196

Electron is just another proof that ease of programming matters. Node.js too was a terrible idea. Who in their right mind would write server-side javascript? It turns out: pretty much anyone who didn't want to have to screw around for hours before being able to respond to a simple http request. Similarly, it is way harder to write a desktop app than a browser app. DOM / CSS manipulation, however bad they are, are yea…

> And what about Python for data analysis? The one language that is known to be 10x slower than C becomes the de-facto standard for a field where what matters most is code performance.

Almost everything done in Python for data analysis is just a thin wrapper on top of a fast C/C++ library: Numpy, scikit, Pandas, Tensorflow, etc

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#282

Post by nojvek »

enobrev wrote: post #168
matthewmacleod wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded for the Mac app. The current experience is shameful .

I have no opinion about their app on those platforms, but as an Ubuntu user, I very much appreciate their electron app.

Yes, the big companies really don't give a fuck about Linux because it's user share is tiny for the desktop.

The fact that a Microsoft editor works on Linux is amazing. Underlying thanks to Electron.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#283

Post by matthewmacleod »

_jal wrote: post #263
treehau5 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

I think people are talking past each other. Yes. Electron enables some new stuff. New stuff that wouldn't exist otherwise. Yes. Electron is a bucket of bloat that saddles what should be small, simple apps with enormous amounts of crap that has nothing to do with the app's functionality. Both of these can be (and are) true.

I think that's the real take-away here. There are upsides and downsides; I am pleased that it is easier to release desktop applications, but sad that the performance of them is so much worse.

I wonder if one of the issues is that so many developers have now worked almost exclusively in the 'web' sphere, and aren't aware that native development maybe isn't as difficult as they think.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#284

Post by ballenf »

_jal wrote: post #252
ballenf wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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…

> Is that true from a user's perspective? It is for this user. > What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Far better resource management, one would hope, for starters. As the article pointed out, when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MB…

Finally an argument that is concrete and understandable! Seriously, this is the first comment I've read that is tangible as opposed to theoretical. All the other complaints are on the basis of being morally offended by the ratio of resource usage vs. application functionality.

The nice thing about slack is that it will run about anywhere. The app on my phone magically knows if the app is not running on my laptop and will then and only then send me notifications. But, I'm not suggesting this as a solution for you -- best productivity killer I know is having to pay attention to yet another device while trying to get work done.

Depends on your environment, but I have of one very effective and successful coworker who just flat out refuses to use Slack. The number of companies where that is acceptable is probably limited. Unfortunately.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#285

Post by jernfrost »

Good someone pointed it out. The web hype has gone of the rails. We got perfectly good development tools for native development which works fine. There are lots of cross platform GUI tool kits too. They offer a better development experience, more dev tools and better performance and memory utilization. It is only because the world is drowning in JavaScript developers who don't want to learn anything else. They want to reuse their latest hipster framework everywhere.

They go on and on how terrible desktop development is, because hey it wasn't equally fast as JavaScript when they had never tried it. Newsflash it is slow and hard to do things you have no experience in.

As a counterpoint, I was able to create a mobile app with native tools for both Android and iOS in less time than it took me to create one in JavaScript. Cross platform JavaScript is highly overrated. It really isn't all that cross platform, often buggy and with primitive debugging and development tools.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#286

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)

#287

Post by catshirt »

ballenf wrote: post #235
matthewmacleod wrote: post #97

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…

> ... 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…

seriously. and skype is a grand example of how shitty a native client can be.

tired of this argument. if you put in the proper effort, your users won't care or notice.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#288

Post by disposablename »

slantyyz wrote: post #244
falcolas wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? A single page web app? That's all most of these are. Particularly the Slack/Hipchat/Discords of the world. > People are excited about the Desktop again If by desktop, you mean "need to be connected to mains power to run for more than 10 minutes", yeah, people are excited for desktops again. Electron only really makes Javascript developers ha…

>> As a consumer, I fail to see the value in having to download large single page webapps that are equivalent (or worse) than their online counterparts. I use the Slack app for Windows, and the value for me is that it gets its own easily identifiable presence in my Windows task bar. I have a (self-inflicted) problem with tab proliferation, and because I rely heavily on Slack, it's just way more convenient to use the…

IE10/11 let you pin any website to the taskbar with its own icon, complete with notification overlays: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg491738(v=vs.85).a...

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#289

Post by roryisok »

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…

This issue is so furiously divisive, and I feel like it brings out the worst in HN. I'm from a web dev background. Some of the comments here make me feel like I should be ashamed of that fact.

I can see both sides of this argument (every time it comes up)

As a consumer of apps, I want the leanest, most minimalist, fastest thing going. I want native apps on my devices (If you think slack is a hog on the desktop you should try it on Windows Phone).

But as a developer, I know that electron is a shortcut that means my app will take less time to build. I can take my existing skills, take work I've already done on a WinJS app and publish it on Mac OS, Linux and Win 7. I can spend more time with my family, instead of spending all my evenings learning py+qt, or xamarin, or react native, or whatever the new fangled thing is. And I know people will use it.

Hell, I've even got better odds of pushing an electron app than a native one, as I can submit a pull request and maybe have it appear on https://electron.atom.io/

Obviously, seeing the Electron hate always gives me pause for thought, but at the end of the day it feels like the hatred is from fellow coders (if a dribbling front-end-js writing low-life such as myself can call you writing-assembly-on-a-napkin-while-you-quote-stallman-types fellow coders) and my apps user-base is overwhelmingly non-technical.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#290

Post by paraboul »

acuozzo wrote: post #256
paraboul wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, We're French and it's indeed hard for us to get this perfectly right and focusing on the project itself at the same time. We're planning to move this to github in order to let the community help us on this.

I'm more than willing to help edit the English you write for this project. Let me know if you're interested.

Definitely! My email is my HN handle at gmail
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