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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)

#521

Post by newhere420 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #418
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.…

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.

I agree with you, but there doesn't really seem to be any native application that occupies the same space as VS Code or Atom. VSCode is not just a text editor like vim or Notepad++, as some people here imply. As you say, it's a miniature IDE. And it's far more comprehensive than Sublime Text.

For .NET Core + TypeScript, VS Code is almost feature parity with full blown VS, while being an awful lot faster. The only thing I find particularly lacking is debugging, but even that is coming along well.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#522

Post by WildGreenLeave »

falcolas wrote: post #173
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…

> 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…

Discord isn't an Electron app, its React native. And as a frequent user on my Macbook and my Android, it isn't resource intensive at all.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#523

Post by sametmax »

edko wrote: post #477
user5994461 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Java because Python proved to be too slow.

Java also has JavaFX, which comes with an embedded Webkit browser. I can create my UI with React, or any other HTML/CSS/JS library, and make it interact with code written in Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Kotlin, Ceylon, Frege, etc. very easily. I think this provides all the benefits of Electron, but is even more flexible and powerful.

Yet, this is not as popular as electron. Ask yourself why.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#524

Post by itaysk »

On Windows I was a huge proponent of Chrome's "save to desktop" feature, which basically gave me the same experience of a native app (separate window, no window chrome, pinnable to start and taskbar, notifications, links open in separate window, etc). I have recently switched to Mac and I miss this feature so much. I have found https://applicationize.me/ but it's not seamless as "save to desktop". I wonder why they dropped it from the Mac version of Chrome...

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#525

Post by chillacy »

gkya wrote: post #117
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 Wut? So the whole Mac App Store, MS Office Suite, Adobe's apps, many other stuff were just a dream? Until Electron desktop was dead? You're bending facts here, and I hope that's because you don't know much about the stuff you're talking about. Desktop is big, just that other things have grown bigger. That doesn't…

Ironically the Mac App Store itself is basically just a WebView in a window, and you're essentially browsing a website (DOM and JS and everything) with extra privileges with the host OS.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#526

Post by fifafu »

Spivak wrote: post #222
madshiva wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's horrible and are not native at all.

So it's basically no worse than Electron. Seriously, if browsers supported an app:// URL which just ran a local site with special privileges and allowed for some custom branding Electron would be dead overnight.

if they'd be giving you access to the complete node.js ecosystem maybe. With electron you can easily integrate native c++ libaries for high performance stuff or things that require hardware access. It's not like electron is just a webbrowser.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#527

Post by vram22 »

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. Again: ease of programming.

That is likely not the only reason. A lot of the libraries like NumPy, SciPy etc., that are one of the reasons (but not the only one) why Python is used so much for STEM / data analysis / data science etc., are written in highly optimized C or C++ or FORTRAN, with maybe thin Python wrappers over them. So ease of programming alone is not the reason. If it was easy but too slow to run (remember, many such apps process huge amounts of data), then people would not use it.

Edited to change "C" to "C or C++".

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#528

Post by sametmax »

reitanqild wrote: post #363
user5994461 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, and they used C because the compilator could optimized stuff the JVM couldn't but now it can. And now Python get type hints so you can have the IDE tools you have with Java like with PyCharm. It's the circle of life.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#529

Post by NegativeLatency »

harisamin wrote: post #171

A 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'd be interesting in working on that if you open sourced it!

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#530

Post by chipotle_coyote »

Touche wrote: post #447
jernfrost wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Why use several host platforms if the platform makes no difference to you? 2) If you know a platform then you should have no problems knowing how to use it. It would be ridiculous to have an app from Windows behave exactly the same in Mac OS just because you don't want to remember the difference. You don't want minimize and maximize buttons put on the opposite side of all other mac apps because that is how it is o…

> 1) Why use several host platforms if the platform makes no difference to you? I don't, I use The Web for 90% of all things I use on a computer. A Chromebook is one of the computers I use the most when not working for precisely this reason. > Why else do you think people make a big point of an app being native Cocoa? It is because they know it sells better, because they know customers want the native well integrated…

I think you're mistaken, the fact that so many company are switching to Electron is evidence that it doesn't sell better.

Hold on a bit with that assertion.

First: which apps built on Electron are being sold, period? All the ones I'm aware of are open source, like Atom, or front ends to services, like Slack.

Second: which companies are switching to Electron for development? Again, all the Electron apps I'm familiar with are ones that started out that way. While I'm sure there's probably an app or two out there that began as a native client and then went to "let's just be a web wrapper," I don't know of any big ones offhand. (I've come across companies that have shifted their strategy to using true native applications, however. Facebook famously shifted their mobile strategy from HTML5/JS to native apps some years back, and I know of several iOS apps that were using "write everything in JS, it'll be great!" toolkits that switched to actual native AppKit.)

Third, and admittedly anecdotally, in both my experience and what I've consistently heard and read from people who've had the opportunity to study the UX of both native and "wrapped web" apps, just because users don't use the language of developers doesn't mean they don't notice when apps are slow, resource-hoggy, and behave kinda weirdly compared to other apps. I run a Slack for a writing group that's mostly populated by non-technical people and it is not uncommon for users to complain about Slack "slowing down their machine." Just because people don't know the term "native app" doesn't mean they aren't going to be able to tell "this app over here is nicer to use than that app over there," and that might be because "that app over there" doesn't minimize properly, or has weird menus that put common things in uncommon places, or doesn't do what they expect when they right-click on selected objects.

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