Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are more complex apps with native versions for multiple platforms, by smaller companies.
Such as?
blender
Electron 3.0.0
51–60 of 141 posts
Re: Electron 3.0.0
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different environment, different conventions, different bugs, different design, different support, different everything. Different teams that have to communicate. It is 'arguable' that it's twice the work, that is true. Twice is the lower bound.
There are options that let you write the bulk of your code in one language then code platform specific user-interfaces against that library. This is basically the Xamarin philosophy for iOS/Android development, and Xamarin apps generally offer a much better user experience than these web-app wrappers cluttering the App Store.
We were talking about desktop apps in this case. It's slightly different on mobile but the parameters are similar. The range of options here involve fiddling with dials that affect cost and quality. The comment I'm replying to amounts to 'why not pretend these dials don't exist?'. The answer is, because they're really there, you can't effectively plan development like that.
Re: Electron 3.0.0
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, this is the "real" changelog. I wish projects didn't waste these great PR opportunities. There should be a blog post written by a human for human consumption that explains why we should be excited.
As someone who doesn’t follow Electron even that is worthless to me. Is there a significant speed/memory usage change? Is the install smaller? Some new features that people want? I don’t know. And I’m not going to read the names of dozens of tickets to try to find out.
> Is there a significant speed/memory usage change? Is the install smaller? Some new features that people want?
No, it still packages two different runtime environments, one of which is a browser, which, in turn, is basically an OS.
Re: Electron 3.0.0
#54I'm working on shipping a new release of my document annotation platform on Electron 3.0
https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf
We've been releasing with the 3.0 betas for about a month now and haven't had any issues. It's been pretty stable.
Actually more stable than the 2.x series as it has a number of bug fixes that weren't in the 2.0.0 ... really glad this platform is still moving forward aggressively.
There are also 4.0 beta builds up which I haven't played with yet.
Re: Electron 3.0.0
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such as?
Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher to name a few, from the same company. [0] Then there are many games, which by their nature require native performance, and of course have to present the same frontend. :) [0] https://affinity.serif.com
Games feel like a separate edge case. One of the most common complaints about cross-platform apps is they don't "feel native" or adhere to platform UX expectations. With games, there's an expectation they'll provide their own wholly own UI that doesn't match an existing commercial OS.
Re: Electron 3.0.0
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not writing the native code that's the problem, it's designing the same GUI experience across platforms that's nearly impossible to do. If it was so easy as you said, a lot of macOS apps would've been portable to Windows years ago given the market share. I work for a cross-platform company, Windows is a much more difficult to develop for compared to macOS. You can write a Cocoa UI but what do you do on Windows w…
Equating electron and cross platform is a gigantic fallacy. Qt and other GUI frameworks (like Juce and FLTK) exist and are blisteringly fast. You don't have to package an entire web browser to make something cross platform.
Qt, or whatever, isn't pretty enough for the designers.
Re: Electron 3.0.0
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is writing native apps honestly still so hard these days? I can appreciate the concerns about maintaining multiple codebases and dealing with different delivery mechanisms and their rules, but modern iOS/macOS and Windows APIs (at least; I cannot speak for Android and Linux) seem just as easy, let you work in arguably better languages, evolve at a faster rate, and provide a better experience for users and their machi…
It's still about twice the work. Or n-times, for n platforms.
It depends.
You could still use a web UI but without embedding Chrome and Node.
Re: Electron 3.0.0
#58I really hope whatever the NativeWindow changes are allow Slack to finally stop rendering when the app goes to the background. My battery has been killed a couple times by the Slack renderer using ~30% cpu playing gifs while the app isn't visible, and their support says its because they don't have a notification hook for minimizing
Is writing native apps honestly still so hard these days? I can appreciate the concerns about maintaining multiple codebases and dealing with different delivery mechanisms and their rules, but modern iOS/macOS and Windows APIs (at least; I cannot speak for Android and Linux) seem just as easy, let you work in arguably better languages, evolve at a faster rate, and provide a better experience for users and their machi…
Yes.
At least N times the work for N platforms.
Fewer developers, harder to recruit.
Cross-platform options like Qt are not modern/pretty enough and sometimes aren't that much thinner than Electron (depending on how well written the app is). Java/Swing/SWT is also quite bloated and looks terrible.
Development is much slower in languages like C++. Other languages are not cross-platform or have immature/buggy cross platform support. How's ObjC on Windows? C# on Mac? They exist, but nobody uses them.
I really think we're in a UI dark age. Native UI development has gone backwards compared to the ease of WYSIWYG GUI design 10-20 years ago. Go back and use the VB.NET GUI builder from 2004 and be in awe at the incredible productivity you could achieve. Platforms are more fragmented today too. There is even fragmentation on the same platform! Do I use Qt or GTK or (insert one of a dozen others) on Linux? WPF or Windows Forms on Windows? Cocoa or UIKit on Mac? Which one will MS or Apple kill tomorrow? ... or I could just say fXXk it and use Electron and be done with it.
This is 100% the fault of vendors. If you hate the bloat blame Microsoft, Apple, and Linux developers, not people who use Electron.
Edit: mobile UI development is less fragmented but it's not really that great either. You get no choice in dev tools and the code is absolutely unportable. I see higher-level web or web-ish views/libraries/frameworks taking over there too. It's already happening.
Re: Electron 3.0.0
#59Will electron apps finally stop canceling OS X shutdown / restart (before quitting themselves)? Atom, Slack, and others each prevent shutdown one at a time.
Re: Electron 3.0.0
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still about twice the work. Or n-times, for n platforms.
It depends. You could still use a web UI but without embedding Chrome and Node.
That sounds like writing and maintaining your own (cross-platform) version of Electron. And then not ending up with a native app for your troubles.