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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

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Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#551

Post by sethc2 »

bluejekyll wrote: post #355
Tenhundfeld wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but I'm hopeful that Electron will get better. When you choose an open source platform with a diverse group of major companies using it, part of what you are betting on is that the platform will a) survive for a reasonable amount of time and b) gradually improve. GitHub, Slack, Spotify, Microsoft, etc., are all using Electron. As their developers gain experience with the platform and as they experie…

On top of that, webassembly could see some improvements across the board.

I agree. I think it also has the potential to help motivate developers to write native UI rather than use electron.

Currently if for your market, your primary target platform is the web, but other platforms are still important, going electron might make sense because you really don't want to write your business logic natively for each platform.

Web assembly allows us to use the same native libraries for all our business logic and data models, which besides being more performant, means we only need to be willing to write the UI natively on top of those libraries. We've actually taken (very) old desktop C++ code, and compiled it to asm.js and ran it in our web app, and then rendered its outputs with webGL onto a canvas and have had surprisingly successful results. This makes the prospect of WASM becoming standard across the board very exciting.

Now let's hope we don't decide to replace our native desktop app, that uses this old C++ library, with an electron app of our web app, running the asm.js compiled library :).

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#552

Post by smokeyj »

AlexandrB wrote: post #499
bitmapbrother wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're joking, right? Electron apps are fully inconsistent with any environment they live in. Want right-click? Sorry. Platform-standard control elements or animations? Nope. Reminds me of some of the worst excesses[1] of AAA Windows software - now available on Mac. [1] http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lFgnREt7Q_c/U2mqWkYYDiI/AAAAAAAAAJ... Edit: I think it's ironic that Macs were criticized for years for having single-butto…

Right click on electron?? What're you talking about?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#553

Post by LeoNatan25 »

cr0sh wrote: post #514
lerpa wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on, I serioulsly don't understand people that are Java developers / front-end developers / technology X devs if you're not talking about you're currently working on, and instead treat that as their profession. Anyone would think it to be ridiculous if a carpenter told you he only works with saws because he is a saw carpenter and that for other kinds of work you should see the plane or sander carpenter . To me sa…

> Anyone would think it to be ridiculous if a carpenter told you he only works with saws because he is a saw carpenter and that for other kinds of work you should see the plane or sander carpenter. ...and yet there are specialties within like "framer" and "finisher", among others. Then you have interior workers like specialized custom cabinet makers, flooring specialist, drywallers, painters, etc. What I'm trying to…

Specializing in one field is not bad, and to me, actually preferable. (I don't like jack of all trades types of developers.)

When the mere notion of a language change or API/paradigm difference frightens you, you are a bad developer.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#554

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#555

Post by apetresc »

_jal wrote: post #252
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…

> Is that true from a user's perspective? It is for this user. > What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Far better resource management, one would hope, for starters. As the article pointed out, when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MB…

> I personally don't care if Electron goes away or what, but to the extent that I'm forced to run Slack by my cow-orkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass.

For what it's worth, since you seem to like IRC clients so much better, Slack has a built-in IRC bridge: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t.... It works just fine, in my experience.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#556

Post by gkya »

chillacy wrote: post #525
gkya wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't see the irony there. And even if there's one, that's irrelevant anyways, the important thing is what's sold thru the app store.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#557

Post by camgunz »

sametmax wrote: post #510
camgunz wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software dev is about tradeoffs, and the argument against Electron is that the tradeoff in resource usage is bananas for nebulous claims about "it looks better" and "I wrote my app faster". Every time this comes up on HN, someone says, "wow, Electron is Dracula to batteries, and all I'm doing is sending text to people/playing an MP3/blinking a cursor". Managing tradeoffs is a fundamental part of development strategy.…

This is the problem here. Your post illustrate it perfectly. You just ignore what the market is saying because "you are right". You are completely missing the point.

I guess I don't know what your point is then. Isn't your argument: "progress means taking advantage of hardware advances to use more productive tools?"

I disagree with your assertion, because I don't think the only measure of progress is how productive programmers are (time-to-market, whatever). There are other measures:

- user experience

- program efficiency (battery life, fossil fuels burned)

- program security

- ease of contribution, maintenance, and improvement

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. But I feel like I've directly addressed your points. I simply don't think that you can say, "well it's X% faster to build an app on Electron, therefore Electron is the best... even though it runs Y% slower and burns Z% more battery". That's why I talked a lot about tradeoffs, because there's more than one issue.

For what it's worth, I also dispute the productivity argument. It's hilariously easy to build an app in Qt Creator. Maybe web devs can build Electron apps faster, but that's because they're web devs. I'd bet if a web dev took a month to get to know Qt they'd be as productive. The difference is that the resulting app would be a lot more efficient.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#558

Post by pseudalopex »

atombender wrote: post #298
Touche wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They fail to integrate with the host platform Just as a counter-point, because native app fans often make this point as though it is universally recognized to be a good thing. I don't want apps to integrate with the host platform. The host platform is not the thing I care about. I use several host platforms in different contexts (I have work and home computers and a smartphone, they all run different OSes) and I wo…

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…

Qt done well comes a lot closer to native look and feel than any Electron app I've ever used. The problem is that a minimum-effort Qt app falls into the uncanny valley. Slack is clearly foreign, but it's polished.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#559

Post by city41 »

coldtea wrote: post #503
Touche wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# has been the default way to write Windows apps since the early 2000s. It is no more "closer to the metal" than JavaScript.

> C# has been the default way to write Windows apps since the early 2000s. No, it really hasn't. It was just the way Microsoft proposed businesses to write bloated internal enterprise apps, what they used to use VB for. Those are not the same as desktop apps -- and no, or very very few, desktop apps, ever turned to C#. Not even MS own apps, like Office, and surely nothing like Abobe's or countless others. > It is no…

A large portion of Visual Studio is written in C#.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#560

Post by zwetan »

tdelet wrote: post #537

Is being "Flash for the desktop" considered a good thing? Wasn't AIR Flash for the desktop? And didn't that already flop?

considering Adobe MAX 2016 Resources about 8 Billions AIR Applications installs, I would not call that a flop

see here for more numbers and details https://discuss.as3lang.org/t/adobe-air-by-the-numbers/476

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