Good article. I've almost always had slow computers... My current cell phone is faster than my netbook, with more RAM too. So I know the pain. So please give everyone a break. My internet access isn't crap either, but when browsing the web is painful to the point where the only thing running on your 'desktop' machine is the browser, there's a big problem. Not only the machine, but developers' mentality.
Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
381–390 of 1001 posts
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blog author here. Thats a fair criticism. I wanted to pick on Spotify and Atom more in my blog post, but both Spotify and Atom have cleaned up their act. I couldn't get either one to reproducibly use lots of CPU. Props to everyone involved in fixing that. But I'd also argue that Flash could always be written to be efficient too. The problem with flash was never the little games people made. The problem was that one t…
> I wanted to pick on Spotify and Atom more in my blog post, but both Spotify and Atom have cleaned up their act Can you please share how you came to the conclusion that Spotify is made with Electron? (hint: it's not)
It uses WebViews heavily.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#383Here'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 nati…
I think, only a special kind of "developers" is afraid of learning languages. A language is, after all, means to use the frameworks. If you are an experienced developer, moving from a language to a language is a matter of hours to days, depending on paradigm changes. Learning frameworks takes much longer, obviously, but with the wealth of information available out there these days (Stack Overflow, message boards, blogs, etc.), "hacking" on new frameworks is also quite easy.
I think all these "massive cost" comments come from sheer ignorance. Those "devs" are frightened at the need to learn a new language and frameworks, overestimate the time required to learn those, look around them and only see likewise clueless "devs", frightened of changes, and extrapolate some comically high overestimation of cost and time, when in reality, a properly written software is much more accessible to join in and support than a web "app" with the contemporary "sexy" observer pattern nonsense splattered all over, coupled with a horrible, horrible dependency management system and a language/framework combo that requires multiple dependencies to perform the most trivial of array loop.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#384A while ago I had been working on a native Mac slack app. I was 70% complete but sidelined it. Should I pick it up again? Would ppl here be interested in paying for something like that? Here are some links to screenshots so you know its not just vaporware :) https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTccjVAAAZ0Kt.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTcbMUkAIYolx.png
I believe it would get a fair amount of attention if it were open sourced. There's lots of Apple platform devs out there who'd love to have a more native Slack experience and would contribute to such a project in a heartbeat (myself included).
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#385Here'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.…
Thanks for your insight. The part that confuses me as a non-native developer is the folks in this thread who seem to be implying that there are only marginal amounts of additional time needed to release cross platform, fully native apps.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#386Earlier 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. 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.…
Steam always used a HTML renderer, even in its 2006 first incarnation. Nowadays it uses the same CEF (chrome library) as electron uses.
So Steam was one of the first "Electron" apps. A very first one was Windows Explorer as of Shell update that came with Internet Explorer for Windows 95 (included by default in Win98). All the sidebars of Explorer were HTML based.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#387People 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.
That's fair enough. But you'll notice I didn't say "you should not be complaining", only that now it's time to stop and act.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#388Here'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…
Layout management: I do wonder sometimes how much awareness the HTML/CSS/JS community has about how layout management is handled in things like Java's Swing or Apple's Auto Layout - or do people think that "desktop style" UI layout management is the "old way of doing things", and obviously HTML/CSS/JS is much more modern and therefore must be better?
I don't think it is better, to be honest, and so I also wonder why people aren't crying out for decent layout management for the web - is it just lack of awareness of how good things could be, or...?
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#389Earlier 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…
Maybe I have the wrong impression, but I feel like the author of the original post never wrote anything cross platform that's sufficiently complex (ie, more than a "let's fill out a form and press OK" Qt app). > The trade-off — and there is a trade-off — is that Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. There's nothing inherently electron-specific that makes an app "shite" any mor…
In article Author says he implemented user space usb driver for Chrome on Mac (guess what Chrome is cross platform)
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#390Here'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…
OneNote is a great example. It has fairly well-regarded native apps for each platform it supports, _and_ a decent web (HTML5) interface.
I think the issue is time and resources. Small teams, like Slack, would like to create a slick experience but they don't have the time.
Companies like Facebook went the other route -- HTML5 on mobile, got their fingers burnt, and went all-in on native. StackOverflow's iOS app appears to have improved a lot too, in v1 it was a thin shell around the web interface.
I hope React Native catches on. I'm not a huge fan of how 'heavy' Electron is myself.