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Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

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Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#101

Post by saagarjha »

icelancer wrote: post #90
kijin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What developers want is important, but what users want is even more important. If a lightweight app is what users want, that's a good enough reason for at least some companies to consider DeskGap over Electron. I'm sick of sluggish "native" apps on my i7 PC with fast SSDs and 32GB of RAM. I don't even want to imagine how those apps perform on low-end devices.

> but what users want is even more important Only developers and very tech-savvy people bitch about Slack. Your average person working in Sales, HR, or operations cares not for the memory footprint of Slack. It's also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's slower than mIRC, fair enough. But IRC is dead to almost everyone and Slack took over, so it is what it is.

They do, but they misdiagnose it as "my computer is slow" or normalize it because that's all they're used to.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#102

Post by sagartewari01 »

middleload wrote: post #95
arcturus17 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard a non-programmer user complain about the Spotify or Slack desktop apps, but that’s just me.

Maybe you don't listen. "Apps" like Slack are on my hate list even above desktop Java apps. Seriously, I can't understand how come it's acceptable to use >1GB of RAM to display 10 lines of text.

What do you think about intellij platform?

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#103

Post by tomc1985 »

arcturus17 wrote: post #74
toper-centage wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, fuck the users. Will nobody think of the poor poor developers?

Never heard a non-programmer user complain about the Spotify or Slack desktop apps, but that’s just me.

Spotify I can understand but Slack's client is hot garbage. Discord has more features and crashes less...

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#104

Post by saagarjha »

icelancer wrote: post #92
ploxiln wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider Slack and Spotify to be good at making applications (despite their popularity). These are the least efficient chat app and least efficient music app ever, in a multi-decade history of chat and music apps, which didn't have the overflowing abundance of convenience and productivity offered by Electron. (This is like the obviously silly quote "we lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume!…

Do you find it weird that you think these are the least efficient apps in their domain and yet they are both extremely popular with the majority of users out there?

Music and chat apps have an extremely high barrier to entry, which makes it quite difficult for others to compete.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#105

Post by laumars »

Klonoar wrote: post #100
laumars wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that writing tests often isn’t fun but it’s as much a part of responsible development as writing useful error messages and not using experimental features on production builds. What really blows my mind is that we’ve reached a point in computing where the developers laziness now outranks the customers needs. > Since I can already see the litany of armchair-quarterback-desktop-app-authors I think you’ll find tho…

I'm actually wading back into the comments here for this specific comment, because it's ridiculous. It's not developer laziness. This is 100% a business decision, and if you've been doing this since the 80s, I'd expect you to know this by now. Do you really think Slack & co chose Electron because it's making developers lives easier? Companies and people choose it because it. just. works. across platforms. This has a…

I do get that point of view but there are as many exceptions to that rule as there are examples.

Take mobile app development: half the products that run on Electron on the desktop will still have native apps on mobiles. And even those that don’t would still have to use the native renderer on iOS and Windows Phone thus you’d be testing your common code base across multiple rendering engines anyway (which was the argument against the tool in this discussion).... and I’ve not even meantioned the slew of cross-platform applications that exist which have successfully avoided using Electron.

There are quite a few cross platform frameworks out there these days and different languages that can leverage them, however the next point I think is the real crux of the problem:

I will grant you that Electron does lower the barrier for entry (which is ironic because I personally find the web stack more awkward to develop in than native widgets - but each to their own). And maybe that’s where the biggest cost saving comes for the business; you can hire cheaper engineers to build and support your desktop software?

In any case, I’m not blind to the appeal of Electron; I just don’t agree with how important it is in the same way as the GP does.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#106

Post by blauditore »

Klonoar wrote: post #5

These projects completely overlook _why_ people choose Electron over the system view. - Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019. - Nobody wants to wait for a vendor to update their implementation when Chrome has the feature available almost immediately. Edit: Since I can already see the litany of armchair-quarterback-desktop-app-authors, I'm just going to link to the comment from…

> Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019

You mean like when building websites?

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#108

Post by saagarjha »

Klonoar wrote: post #100
laumars wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that writing tests often isn’t fun but it’s as much a part of responsible development as writing useful error messages and not using experimental features on production builds. What really blows my mind is that we’ve reached a point in computing where the developers laziness now outranks the customers needs. > Since I can already see the litany of armchair-quarterback-desktop-app-authors I think you’ll find tho…

I'm actually wading back into the comments here for this specific comment, because it's ridiculous. It's not developer laziness. This is 100% a business decision, and if you've been doing this since the 80s, I'd expect you to know this by now. Do you really think Slack & co chose Electron because it's making developers lives easier? Companies and people choose it because it. just. works. across platforms. This has a…

> Less resources, less platform-specific wizardry, more focus on core features with faster turnaround time.

Where can I request the "core features" of performance and usability?

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#109

Post by cotelletta »

patr0nus wrote: post #2

Hi HN, DeskGap is another try to build an lightweight alternative to Electron. Compared to the existing attempts [0, 1], I choose not to go that far and bundle a real Node.js with it[2]. And to battle test the framework, I wrapped squoosh[3] into a desktop app[4] with DeskGap, and successfully submitted it to the app stores. [0] https://github.com/pojala/electrino [1] https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark [2] https://d…

I'm going to avoid installing Windows 10 for as long as possible, so I hope this never takes off. No offense.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#110

Post by accatyyc »

alexandernst wrote: post #9
patr0nus wrote: post #2

Hi HN, DeskGap is another try to build an lightweight alternative to Electron. Compared to the existing attempts [0, 1], I choose not to go that far and bundle a real Node.js with it[2]. And to battle test the framework, I wrapped squoosh[3] into a desktop app[4] with DeskGap, and successfully submitted it to the app stores. [0] https://github.com/pojala/electrino [1] https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark [2] https://d…

How is Deskgap lightweighter than Electron if, at the end of the day, it's using the browser on my OS (which, let's assume, is Chrome)?

Because if it uses the same browser binary as your other web apps (tabs or other DeskGap apps), the OS can share memory between them. Not possible with electron since every app bundles its own Chromium binary.
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