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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)

#361

Post by scribu »

sametmax wrote: post #182

People complaining about electron are the same type than the ones that used to say : - why are people writing this stuff in C. It's so slow and you don't have as much control on memory. Write it in Assembly. - why are people writing this stuff in Java. It's so slow and you don't have as much control on memory. Write it in C. - why are people writing this stuff in Python. It's so slow and you don't have as much contro…

> So get over it or provide a solution, but stop complaining.

Complaining is a necessary first step in finding a better solution. Before being able to solve a problem, you need to first articulate what the problem is.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#362

Post by wfleming »

kevinchen wrote: post #299
wfleming wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed the same myself, and I'm a bit surprised Slack hasn't done the same trick some of the larger image hosts have and started converting gifs to videos. Those hosts did it to cut bandwidth costs, but it also helps users as a side effect. (I continue to be amused that everyone records & shares gifs for "compatability" and "simplicity", but many of the places they're shared re-convert them into videos.)

I know nothing about how Electron renders GIFs, but can guarantee you that there's no world where 16x16 animation should take up 20% CPU. Suggesting that we should convert them to tiny videos is completely missing the point.

The problem is that in popular usage many GIFs are not 16x16. People are sharing high resolution GIFs that can weigh tens of MB, and rendering several of those at once (whether directly in Chrome or in Electron) is not a negligible amount of CPU. It shouldn't peg a core, of course, but it's definitely higher impact than videos of similar sizes, since video rendering is considerably more optimized for these cases than GIFs are.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#363

Post by reitanqild »

user5994461 wrote: post #262
sametmax wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computing for ever. We use C to avoid writing assembly. Use Java to avoid writing C. Use Python to avoid writing Java. The world is asking for more and more software, and the resources to provide it are not following so people are taking shortcuts. Want something better ? Someone has to pay for it.

We use Java because Python proved to be too slow.

And because the IDE support (refactoring etc etc), compile time error checking and ease of use more than compensates for Java being a little bit verbose.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#364

Post by userSumo »

userSumo wrote: post #315

I am a young programmer, student, front end developer/designer, with some knowledge of languages such as java, php. I am developing one electron app, and it is going great. And I don't even know javascript that much. But in my case, usage of browser engine is essential, since it has to do with rendering HTML and so on. I have less than 1000 lines of javascript and almost everything was working after 2 weeks. It is no…

but if there was something exciting like red-lang with easy to do custom UI ( if needed ) and with some ecosystem around it, i would definitely look into it

http://www.red-lang.org/

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#365

Post by devopsproject »

cdnsteve wrote: post #138

If I wanted to make a desktop App work on Windows and macOS today, without using Electron, what are my options to build something very quickly that also include the benefits of Electron: self updating, app crash reporting, windows installers, no licensing fees?

react

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#366

Post by rvanmil »

josephg wrote: post #22
toni wrote: post #4

On macOS, the alternative would be to use Fluid[1]. You can build mini-apps from a lot of websites and the footprint is very little. (No affiliation, just a happy user) [1] http://fluidapp.com/

Unless I'm missing something, isn't that just wrapping the webpage in an embedded WebView? If so its basically doing the same thing as electron, except using Safari instead of Chrome and not giving the app any native API access. This helps in 2 ways: - Safari is less of a resource hog than chrome - It avoids the huge 380 meg download of electron But it doesn't solve the runtime problems. The app is still running insi…

Slack with Fluid: 1 process, 208 MB.

Slack Electron: 4 processes, 56 MB + 355 MB + 64 MB + 29 MB = 504 MB

This is after signing in to one team, (janky) scrolling through a couple of channels and running for a few minutes.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#367

Post by c-smile »

Just in case: FreeConferenceCall / StartMeeting ( https://www.startmeeting.com/spring-2016-updates ) is using Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) for their UI.

This app provides video communication, screen sharing and chat so is comparable with the Slack, Skype and others.

Sciter core is a single dll of 5-8 mb in size (StartMeeting uses it as a static library ).

Sciter does not create any processes or even threads (modulo HTTP client that uses thread pool). StartMeeting runs the same UI on all supported desktop platforms: Win/Mac/Lin.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#368

Post by newhere420 »

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. They fail to integrate with the host platform, they are slow, they hog memory and drink power.

Are they though? The two applications that use the most energy on my Mac - by far - are Steam and Skype. Steam still has trouble with HiDPI and freezes when performing various UI interactions. The number of problems with Skype are uncountable.

I'm currently booted into Windows for work, looking at my current process stats, the top memory consumers are:

* Visual Studio (hodge podge of all kinds of things, 800MB)

* Chrome (215MB)

* Microsoft Intune (presumably native, 114MB)

* GitHub (.NET WPF application, 108MB)

* Explorer (native, 103MB)

* Search Indexer (native, 107MB)

* Lync (who knows, 98MB)

Meanwhile, the supposedly terrible Electron apps:

* Spotify - 58MB

* Slack - 93MB

* VS Code - 60MB

As far as interfaces go, Spotify, Slack and VS Code easily outclass GitHub, Visual Studio, Explorer and Lync in usability.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#369

Post by jernfrost »

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…

The electron apps I've seen don't really have much UI. As soon as you build an app with some complexity it will start being a problem.

As a native Mac developer I can drop in things like a predicate editor for defining filters or queries. They come with Cocoa. I can put in sophisticated table views and tree views. I can connect all of this easily to core data which loads from a database objects on demand without any code needed to be written by me.

You see this sort of shortcuts in the electron apps I've seen. They don't have proper GUI for preference configuration like any Mac app as they can't get that for free. Atom doesn't have a regular file open dialog. I use that a lot, dropping a file into it to jump to a particular location I got open in Finder (file manager).

My preferred editor, TextMate has very little development resources behind it compared to Atom, yet it has a far richer GUI. You got a GUI for creating and editing plugins. Not just editing config files. You got native rich UIs for selecting fonts and colors. You don't have to write font names and color names in some config file.

There is a certain irony in the claim about how stuff like Electron saves you cross platform code, when what is usually not cross platform is the GUI, and the electron apps I've seen has very little of it. Try making something with the complexity of Keynote, Pages or Numbers in electron and I think the lack of a comprehensive set of prefabricated GUI components will start making its mark.

Not to mention the numerous native APIs which exist which you have to duplicate, e.g. for vector graphics, animations, 3D graphics, audio, video, font handling, OpenCL.

How about people with disabilities or internationalization? You got great native tools for doing that, how do you accomplish that in Electron without re-inventing the wheel?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#370

Post by lerpa »

disposablename wrote: post #288
slantyyz wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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...

Same for Chrome: http://www.geekpen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Chrome-Mor...

Probably Firefox also has this.

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