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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)

#771

Post by [deleted] »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #97
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…

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…

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Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#772

Post by laythea »

nilliams wrote: post #629
laythea wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the plus side, this is an ideal situation to take advantage of - by creating native and fast applications, it becomes easier (compared to before when everyone was doing it "the hard way") to distinguish your product in a bloated market.

Not sure if ironic, seems a sure bet most users won't notice and gladly prefer the "bloated" product. Yet to hear a single non-dev coworker complain about Spotify being "bloated".

Sorry, I should of been a bit more clear. I meant demanding applications.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#775

Post by AlphaSite »

mi100hael wrote: post #665
AlphaSite wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actively don't use and discourage people from using Slack where I can because of how poorly it runs.

And because it's a closed-source, expensive implementation of IRC.

That's not great, but I can live with that.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#776

Post by farzher »

Electron is amazing. It's the best thing to happen to desktop since I can remember.

Yeah it makes slow apps, but these apps wouldn't be possible otherwise. It's perfect for prototyping new exciting ideas, it's fun to use, and there's no alternative.

When your app get super popular maybe you should rewrite it in gross native code though.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#777

Post by Arizhel »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #375
Veen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, why would any developer or organization doing development "want" to pay those costs, as you suggest they should?

To make a quality product and offer a better user experience?

Users may not notice the slowness right away, but if they run a bunch of applications at once they probably will, and they're more likely to notice it while running on battery.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#778

Post by automathematics »

castone wrote: post #543
automathematics wrote: post #454

So many divisive opinions here, but in case anyone reads this far down, here's my 2 cents: - Yes, desktop apps existed before Electron. But the top comment is right. How many desktop apps. NOT utilities but full featured apps (like Spotify and Atom) that you loved either got swallowed up by other companies (Mailbox) or discontinued due to "lack of use" (read: lack of profitability). I'm sure if you dig deep you can r…

Why not use Unity instead?

Mainly two (honest) reasons:

1) After years of C++ in games, I've written a lot of JS. I believe in where the language is going and I saw an opportunity to use JS to write a cross platform 2-D game engine with low overhead and went for it

2) Unity lends itself very well to 3D games in my experience, or 3-D games with a fixed camera to look 2D. So this would likely lead to overhead involving "Well, let's just render the 2-d components in 3-d" which easily spirals into needing a modeler, a rigger, an animator, a concept artist and a programmer MINIMUM to run the game. As it stands now I need a 2-D artist and a single dev.

Oh, I lied:

3) I can't create a business as easily marketing a unity mod than marketing a stand alone FOCUSED engine on one type of game. But if my plan fails, I can still write a unity renderer for my game since most of my logic is serverside and platform agnostic. So who knows! :)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#779

Post by btschaegg »

ori_b wrote: post #733
brightball wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real trick is whether or not users care about: A) This works on all of the platforms that we use vs B) Performance could be better on my computer It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...which is almost entirely because SSD's make them so much less noticeable if you start dipping into swap unless you're really working out your machine. For most us…

> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems. This annoys me a lot, for one of two reasons. Either: 1. Some developers have no idea what performance means -- it's crazy that I have time to notice a spinner when a glorified IRC client starts up or switches tabs, let alone have time to watch it for tens of seconds. or: 2. If these developers are claiming th…

On point 1: Also there's still the effect where your app does the same thing a native app would do in an equally reasonable time but uses twice as much power to do it.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#780

Post by pdimitar »

grinich wrote: post #404

At Nylas we made a huge bet on Electron-- our desktop app Nylas Mail actually started as a fork of Atom Shell before the project was rebranded to "Electron." To be honest, we would have never built this app without Electron. It allowed us to have a small team (2 devs) ship the first version of the app without learning an entire new dev toolchain on multiple platforms. There certainly can be performance issues with bu…

It pains me to see how a person responsbile for a pretty important app is as oblivious as you are to the real issues.

Many people use laptops and their battery life matters a lot, being one "minor" factor. Not to mention that in a technical sense, your app really shouldn't take any CPU while idling. Doing a socket wait is something a Raspberry Pi Zero handles without going to more than 1% CPU, for half a second.

At any rate, other people in this thread explained it much better than I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14091782

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