I tried Hyper, listed in their "apps made with Electron" gallery thing. lol 250 megabyte fancy command-prompt
Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
871–880 of 1001 posts
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#872Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but Python still doesn't seem to have a great cross-platform desktop GUI, as far as I can find. I'd prefer to code entirely in Python if I could, but I haven't liked a single GUI library I've tried for Python. Although to be fair I haven't really tried PyQT out still, but I don't like the idea of having to buy a commercial license for it.
PyQT is alright. Kivy as well. Or anything in any other language. But none of them are close enough to the benefit of being able to use the tone of experience from the Web UI into the desktop. Eventually all GUI app toolkit ends up with a custom MVC framework, a client/server architecture, some kind of db for persistence, their own implementation of asynchronous event and communication models and a declarative layer…
It's completely false.
The web at the beginning was a huge mess of static pages, hacked CGI scripts and no interactivity at all with the need to submit a form to trigger a full reload of the page.
Everything was absolutely synchronous and a lot of times the database was accessible directly from the public interface and some pages did actually have the connection string directly in the HTML for everyone to see.
I'm really not sure in which alternate reality you have seen web apps doing all that forever.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#873Earlier 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…
3. Battery life is excluded from "performance".
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#874At 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…
I've seen this before in various forms: * Don't use PHP its a fractal of bad design - most popular server side language before * Don't use JavaScript its a scripting language - most popular programming language * Don't use Flash its bad for security and accessiblity - most popular authoring tool for animated web apps. * Don't use WordPress its a spaghetti mess - most popular CMS * Don't use VB6! - most popular rapid…
> The most popular techs are the most practical and easy-to-use ones.
Funny how a high priesthood of people who get paid a lot of money would pour scorn on anything that lets the "mundanes" solve problems with computers.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#875Earlier 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.
The vast majority of users (like >99%) don't have a clue why their computer isn't performing up to par. They literally have no idea how any of it works. They might just assume that it's slow because they haven't deleted spam emails in a while (even while they use gmail) or didn't pay extra to get that 3.2Ghz machine instead of the 3Ghz. They certainly don't have any idea how to open up top stats and check what resour…
Yes, you'll often hear things like "I think I have a virus" or "I think I need a new computer". They're computer is fine, they're just running slow apps.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#876Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, my point is people will use anything that allow them to do what they want the easiest way possible, not matter the cost and cleaness. The point is the web is the most active platform. The point is doing things right is not winning. The reason you are missing the point is that you think it's only a technical problem. It is not. It's technical + cultural + societal + historical + economical. > It's hilariously easy…
Thanks for clarifying :) You're right, I missed the point. > people will use anything that allow them to do what they want the easiest way possible, not matter the cost and cleaness. I disagree, because people are implementing things in Rust right now even though it's harder than doing it in JS. Generally, they do that because they care about things like performance, safety, and maintainability. For them, "harder" is…
Great analogy to surgery :)
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#877I've been working on a hobby app for some years that is a modern refresh of an old idea. As the article exhorts (and just for funsies, it's just a hobby) I'm writing it using native code and to be conservative on resources. Every place I need to render text or make a thing respond to a mouse click I need to manually do all my own text layout and event handling and so on. (The app is in a domain where it needs special…
If it can't use Qt then it's also probable it can't use Electron, otherwise, why don't you just use Qt?
Did you even bother reading past the first sentence before you recommended Qt?
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#878There's two kinds of developers. Dorks who care about programming, and programmers who care about creating deliverable value. What do consumers think about electron apps? That's all that matters. Consumers don't know what the heck electron is, only that their apps work seamlessly across platforms. The only people who complain about electron apps are dorks who have an axe to grind with web developers. I'd rather have…
I regret that I have but one upvote to give.
Funny how much of HN is happy to see people dismantle social contracts or break the law to "create value" in startups, always justified with the idea "people want a thing", but shit bricks if someone wants to spend more time worrying about the UX of an app than micromanaging bytes of memory.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#879Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Javascript. But 160MB for a chat app? That's insane.
Do you think they are optimizing for file size? Do you think their customers really care? (The answer to both is no.)
The customers do care, they just don't know how to express it or who is at fault, they just know their "computer is slow and might have a virus".
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#880People complaining about electron are the same type than the ones that used to say : - why are people writing this stuff in C. It's so slow and you don't have as much control on memory. Write it in Assembly. - why are people writing this stuff in Java. It's so slow and you don't have as much control on memory. Write it in C. - why are people writing this stuff in Python. It's so slow and you don't have as much contro…
> - why are people writing this stuff in Java. It's so slow and you don't have as much control on memory. Write it in C.
When did we move on from this stage? Desktop java is a failure for good reason. Electron is an order of magnitude slower again.
Most widely used desktop apps are still written in c/c++.