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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)

#831

Post by ender89 »

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…

They don't. Java apps have been cross platform since their inception, .net is extremely close to being just as versatile, x11 is available on mac and pc, and python will run on literally anything. There's a pile of cross-platform options out there for you. What electron does is reduce the barrier to designing UIs, since you can do it all in html and javascript and its just as easy as hiring the guys who did your website to design. Because the one thing all those platforms have in common? Aside from .net (which isn't mature), they all have absolutely hideous windowing systems. Just ugly.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#832

Post by douche »

zensavona wrote: post #827

...and you know what Flash did for the web when it came out? Allowed us to watch videos, drag and drop, consume all kinds of media and have interactive applications on the web which were at the time totally unachievable with JavaScript. Is the internet's memory so short that you've forgotten how recently we have largely switched to HTML5 video?

We've just spent the last 10 years spinning to get back to where we were, because Steve Jobs vetoed Flash support. Before that, we bailed on similar capabilities from Java applets, and had to reimplement them.

Doubtless there's multiple technologies before my time that gave us the same powers, but were abandoned because reasons.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#833

Post by cobalt »

yesimahuman wrote: post #238
matthewmacleod wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The user experience of Slack as a desktop app is not great. The UI is consistently one of the highest energy users on my machine, despite being one of the worst performing (have you ever tried scrolling up into a conversation's history?)

Scrolling up involves network calls, so clearly it's going to be slower. Energy usage is definitely an area of improvement.

i can easily scroll 10k lines in mIRC no problem

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#834

Post by Sanddancer »

nojvek wrote: post #268
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…

I totally agree with you. I only use Slack from we app but I'm a heavy user of VSCode and Spotify. I believe in standardized Web API's rather than a clusterfuck of native API's. The problem here is the base platform Electron and underlying Chrome/Nodejs But as consumers we feel when our browser lags, so browser vendors optimize speed over memory and cpu, caching the shit out of everything. The Web is a dangerous plac…

So use a cross-platform toolkit then like Qt, WxWidgets, Tk, etc. You don't need the bloat of a browser engine.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#835

Post by devmunchies »

wvenable wrote: post #783
devmunchies wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody in the last ~20 years has cared about writing Web apps before JS came along. There's basically zero money in it Zero money in web apps? You mean like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitch, Netflix, and YouTube? There's way more money is web apps than desktop apps. hands down. I'm not talking about mobile because this is a convo about electron.

Desktop apps like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop? I too can pick a few ridiculous outliers. Honestly I'm not sure if you're right or wrong but either way that argument isn't good.

> I too can pick a few ridiculous outliers

Those examples aren't event good, though. They all seems to be becoming less popular these days.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#836

Post by Sophistifunk »

dubcanada wrote: post #189
Philipp__ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's bullsh*t. Sorry but what you said was factually incorrect. What Electron did is it enabled all those web devs (even front end guys) to write "desktop" apps. And trade offs are certainly visible. I am boycotting Electron. I have zero Electron apps installed, and recommend strongly against it. I hate that web dev mindset that has been pushed into desktop userland. It just doesn't work that way. Write native…

Can you expand on your last sentence? How is React + browser rendering any different then QT rendering? How is HTML/CSS any different from QT layout xml? How is QT sockets/threading any different from NodeJS sockets/threading? They are very very close to each-other. Obviously they are not exactly the same, and I used QT in this example. But they are not wrong, or completely different.

The problems you get from Electron apps isn't V8, it's Chromium. React-native apps will behave and consume resources much more like a native app than an electron app, hence the name.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#838

Post by Sophistifunk »

mlsarecmg wrote: post #744
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the wonders of discovering the observer pattern. It's really a life "changer". How did the computer world survive for so many decades without it.

Explain? Redux isn't even close to observables in other systems. It's the immutable pattern that's a life changer if anything.

Redux and co are still the same pattern fundamentally, it's just that the implementing code is spread throughout your stack, instead of in an "Observable" implementation. That combined with an optimisation allowing identity and state equality to be conflated.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#839

Post by Sophistifunk »

bobthedino wrote: post #388
cpburns2009 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody 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 the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies. Clearly Java never existed. I've been experimenting with Swing lately because Java has a library I'm interested in using. It's a breath of…

Layout management: I do wonder sometimes how much awareness the HTML/CSS/JS community has about how layout management is handled in things like Java's Swing or Apple's Auto Layout - or do people think that "desktop style" UI layout management is the "old way of doing things", and obviously HTML/CSS/JS is much more modern and therefore must be better? I don't think it is better, to be honest, and so I also wonder why…

The largest barrier to good layout on the web is that you can't measure text. All you can do is measure a node that has a specific text, which takes a long time and includes a reflow, which means either a) abysmal performance, or b) an entirely async layout algorithm, which would be much more complicated.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#840

Post by sanbor »

For something like a music player maybe electron it's not the best choice. But Slack might have several features where they need to parse and show html. Also, they're probably using webrtc for calls. On top of that, they can reuse most of their code which is a web app. That means less bugs and if they fix a security issue in the web app they also fix the desktop/electron app.

I wonder why the author doesn't just use the web app in chrome. The notifications works pretty well.

Personally, I prefer the performance penalty and enjoy apps in Linux than having great desktop apps that only work on Windows and/or Mac. It would be great to not have to choose but we all have limited resources and Linux often doesn't make it in native desktop apps.

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