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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)

#461

Post by apostacy »

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…

> P.S: oh, and if electron is flash, remember that flash won the web for 15 years while it sucked. And you know why ? Because it allowed people to do stuff they wanted easily, like videos and animations. And it's not because we couldn't do it any other way, we could. Yet we had to wait almost 2 decades to see it dies, at the price of battery, stability, security and everything else. Feature trumps everything. People. Don't. Care. We only manage to kill it because we finally replaced it with systems that could compete on easiness and features. So you know what to do.

I really miss the simplicity of a self contained swf file that could be embedded in an html page, but was usually also self contained and could be downloaded and run on its own. And of course they are tiny and fast. And I could run them in Linux, or even on my Palm Pilot. Except for battery consumption, were they really that bad?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#462

Post by lerpa »

stedalus wrote: post #271
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…

Your Python example doesn't really support your argument. Python succeeded for data analysis and scientific computing in part because it provided easy access to existing numerical libraries written in C and Fortran. So you got the best of both worlds: ease of use and near-native speed. It would not have succeeded if everything was done in interpreted Python.

> ease of use and near-native speed

And still when we want actual speed we port it to C++ or at least need to use Cython.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#463

Post by spoiler »

abdulkareemsn wrote: post #389
spoiler wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Implementing a feature for macOS in Chromium is considered a cross platform project these days?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#464

Post by ksk »

ballenf wrote: post #308
wishinghand wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? No country trains software engineers in the way you describe.

I think Germany was the country described in the post. Whether it's true to the fullest extent is hard to say, but having worked and socialized with them for years it seems mostly true. Engineering is the country's actual official religion. And I mean that as the highest compliment. (No offense to any other country's engineers -- the engineer mindset is the same everywhere, but the mindset of the non-engineer in othe…

Our company recently purchased some Hardware I/O devices that came with software (both made in Germany). Lets just say, I'd much rather buy their cars than their software.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#465

Post by LeoNatan25 »

philliphaydon wrote: post #449
newhere420 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

http://imgur.com/a/Ofyei Chrome kills me. :(

Stop using it. Both Firefox and Edge have come a long way. I recently dropped Chrome and have not looked back.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#466

Post by sametmax »

coldtea wrote: post #445
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.

> Computing for ever. We use C to avoid writing assembly. Use Java to avoid writing C. Use Python to avoid writing Java. Yeah, but until Electron and they like, we seldom shipped desktop apps in anything than C, C++, Delphi etc even after all those decades. Which are all as close to the metal as can be. And in fact C/C++ can be as fast, or even faster than hand-rolled assembly most of the time (with few exception), s…

You bet ? I have 3 software opened right now using Python for their GUI: my rss reader, my torrent downloader and dropbox. And I got many more installed on my machine.

But the thing is, even when I write something for myself, I first write a command line app, then a web service. Never a GUI, because it's such pain.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#467

Post by smitherfield »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #432
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code has way fewer features than Visual Studio, especially for C#/.NET development. VS Code is a minimalistic IDE, very useful, especially for javascript development where tooling is quite minimal anyways. But let's not think that VS Code outclasses visual studio.

VS Code is not an IDE in the classic sense of what IDE is - integrated development environment. It's a text editor with some debugging extensions. I don't think it is even comparable to Visual Studio at all.

IMO it qualifies as an IDE for Typescript, and borderline with Javascript — slightly better than WebStorm in the former case and slightly worse in the latter — but not so much other languages.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#468

Post by pluma »

Veen wrote: post #116
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…

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've switched from Sublime Text 3 (native) to VSCode (Electron) and I couldn't be happier. If I didn't know it's electron based I wouldn't have been able to tell as a user. YMMV so don't generalise.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#469

Post by lobster_johnson »

Touche wrote: post #435
atombender wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you don't care. These are examples "integration with the host platform": * Text selection * Caret behaviour (e.g. Option-arrows on macOS) * Clipboard * Spell check * Open/save dialogs * File system access * Drag/drop * Window management * Accessibility (screen reader support etc.) * Standard right click menus * Indexing (e.g. Spotlight on macOS) * etc. You may be thinking to native UI idioms, which even Apple…

No, I don't care about most of those things. I don't know why you didn't believe me when I wrote it the first time :). "Caret behavior", I use a Mac 8 hours a day and I have no idea what option-arrow does. That clipboard shortcuts work the same is the only one that I'm used to enough to be annoyed if it were done differently. There's something about Mac fans that are very preoccupied with all of the details of how Ma…

You don't select or navigate in text?

Shift+arrows — select characters

Option+arrows — jump between words or paragraphs

Cmd+arrows — jump to beginning/end of line or text

Shift+Option+arrows — select words or paragraphs

Option+Backspace — delete one word back

Cmd+A — select all

I actually used all of these except the last one while writing and formatting this comment! Plus clipboard shortcuts.

If you use vim in a terminal 100% of the time, none of those will matter to you because vim invents its own keyboard universe. But if you don't, I don't understand how you can have this opinion.

I get super annoyed with anything that somehow overrides these standard keyboard shortcuts, which is suprisingly often. Non-native UIs typically have to reimplement them because modern OSes have made the curious choice of not abstracting them.

I don't think it is a "Mac fans" thing. The exact same principles apply to Windows. Even to Linux, although the keyboard standardization there is next to non-existent. (I don't use Linux desktops often, but when I do, I get really frustrated that the terminals use Ctrl as a meta key instead of Command. So "copy" isn't Cmd+C, it's something like Ctrl+Alt+C.)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#470

Post by bitmapbrother »

smokeyj wrote: post #403

There's two kinds of developers. Dorks who care about programming, and programmers who care about creating deliverable value. What do consumers think about electron apps? That's all that matters. Consumers don't know what the heck electron is, only that their apps work seamlessly across platforms. The only people who complain about electron apps are dorks who have an axe to grind with web developers. I'd rather have…

Well said. Being able to write an application and have it work on multiple platforms without any major UI inconsistencies or UX idiosyncrasies is a major benefit.
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