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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)

#531

Post by taude »

geodel wrote: post #19

Very timely article. But I have been told to shut up and use Atom/VSCode/Slack like everyone else and upgrade hardware if software runs slow. I find memory/cpu efficient applications not just useful but respectful to users specially when upgrading hardware is not possible due to financial or policy reasons.

I'm running VSCode and Slack on an 11" MB AIR with 8GB Ram (Early 2014). I'm not really seeing performance problems, even with about 40 tabs open on my Google Chrome. While I do occasionally see Slack occasionally popping up on my Activity Monitor, as a user I don't feel I've actually been negatively impacted by this.

What kind of hardware are you on as a developer?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#532

Post by grinich »

Mithaldu wrote: post #500
grinich wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another one for your list: Nylas Mail. We straight up would have not shipped it without Electron and the CPU it uses to sync is on-par with apps like Apple Mail & Thunderbird.

I'm holding off my downvote to see if i can get a straight answer out of you. Nylas Mail bills itself as the best email app. Them's strong words, but maybe you're worth the claim? Let's see! I see from screenshots that Nylas has folders and labels. Can i use either of these in the following fashion? - i can have a tree structure of them - an email can be in two separate folders/labels at the same time - folders/label…

Some quick answers

• If by "tree structure" you mean a folder hierarchy, yep that's supported. I think we have a current bug with dragging nested subfolders but we're working on a fix. (Surprisingly >99% of users have a flat hierarchy.)

• A thread can certainly be in two separate folders (e.g. Inbox and Sent) but an individual message can't be in two folders at once. In that situation there are two copies on the actual mail server. For Gmail/Gsuite this is possible via labels where any thread can have an arbitrary number of labels. We support both systems.

• "labels can be configured to learn which emails to automatically sort into themselves, based on the email contents" -- this is a really cool idea and something we've talked about internally. AFAIK there is no cross-platform mail client that does this today beyond things like manual Gmail filters. It could also be an interesting plugin that anyone could build on NM. We have a Slack chat room where folks discuss stuff like this if you're interested: http://slack-invite.nylas.com/

• And for your bonus round (haha) yes there are 2 different ways to configure the UI. One of them is 3-pane with a reading mode like Outlook, and the other is 2-pane that navigates like Gmail. http://i.imgur.com/Lt0x7O4.png

Also in 3-pane if you make the message list wide enough it will switch into the compact version: http://i.imgur.com/SaGp9eV.png

(Obviously it will show your real mail data. We have a "screenshot mode" for sharing stuff like this without revealing sensitive information.)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#533

Post by coldtea »

sametmax wrote: post #518
mpweiher wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I've been shipping desktop apps in Objective-C for roughly a quarter of a century. Gets me the high-level, Smalltalk-ish productivity when I want it (most of the time) and the low-level C efficiency when I need it (sometimes). Having my cake and eating it, that's me :-)

But can you make a website with the same knowledge ? Can you make it portable to other OS ? Can you reuse 20 years of knowledge, resources and libs ? Can you hire tomorrow 10 experts to help you on it ? Quality of the tech is NOT the drive for success here. You are missing the point.

>Quality of the tech is NOT the drive for success here. You are missing the point.

Well, maybe it's better to miss the point, than to succeed by selling crap to people who deserve better?

When are technies gonna stand up for quality of tech?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#534

Post by Johnny_Brahms »

catshirt wrote: post #287
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…

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.

Skype for Linux is a web app. It is a lot worse than the old Qt client.

Are the other platforms native? I thought they switched to webrtc in 2015 to be able to just use a simple web window wrapper for all platforms, just not Linux.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#535

Post by seanmcdirmid »

newhere420 wrote: post #521
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.

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 thi…

I agree, I use VS Code because its the best choice I have for Typescript development on the Mac. However, I still miss Visual Studio while using it. The debugger especially wants to make me cry, though this might have more to do with Chrome than VS Code's front end for it.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#536

Post by zwetan »

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…

well... actually "flash for desktop" best known as Adobe AIR is a pretty good alternative to Electron.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#538

Post by egorst »

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. :(

For me (I open a lot of tabs), Chrome is unusable without 'The Great Suspender' extension

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#539

Post by stiGGG »

srssays wrote: post #325
stiGGG wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So if the Electron bloat is such as issue for you, just hit Slack in the web directly. That's even more horrible, i've tried it. Chrome uses his own notifications on macOS instead of integrating with systems notification manager and always when one of these ugly, poor animated guys pops up, i can search through my 100 open browser tabs to find the damn chat. Millions of flamewars were fought about what's the best wi…

Use Safari then.

Safari just doesn't work for me. It's my favorite browser ui wise, every time i'm getting a new machine i first stick with safari, but after a while under heavy use i notice all the problems with Safari getting slow, doing weird things, etc and i find myself on the Chrome download page again :(

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#540

Post by vram22 »

TimJYoung wrote: post #328
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…

"Please someone, write that !"... We actually have written something similar for our product Elevate Web Builder (commercial, closed-source, written in Delphi), and have considered moving it to Free Pascal in order to allow developers to use it in portable, native desktop applications. The IDE for Elevate Web Builder has to provide a browser-like design-time environment for the WYSIWYG designers, so we created one. I…

Interesting, so you've create or are trying to create (or make cross-platform) something like a web dev environment in and for Object Pascal?
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