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Electron 7.0

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron 7.0

#101

Post by all_blue_chucks »

scrollaway wrote: post #5

I'm bullish on Electron. I think it's just a couple of technical advancements away from being the ultimate desktop toolkit. For context, I love and have worked a ton with Qt, and I much prefer Qt UIs as a user. But Electron has brought true cross-platform development to all platforms (Including Linux!). If it weren't for Electron, I wouldn't even have a bunch of the apps I use today. Hell, I wouldn't have a good IDE,…

> Electron has brought true cross-platform development to all platforms (Including Linux!).

Last I checked, electron did not work on OpenBSD.

Re: Electron 7.0

#102

Post by rolleiflex »

vtail wrote: post #90
rolleiflex wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I release two apps, across 3 OSes, in somewhat of a bimonthly cadence with a low defect rate. That’s 6 different binaries. I’m a solo founder. I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist . It allows more people to try building more thing and that is a net positive. The speed problems and bloat issues of Electron is just shoddy programming on t…

Good rationale from a maker, not a purist, and good luck with your projects! I liked the site, it's clean and to the point. Just a small nitpick: right under the Demo download button, you say "(Demo does not have Pro features such as team management, access control and others)". I wouldn't say that - that essentially gives the user a (subconscious) rationale on why she shouldn't download the demo. I would suggest to…

Thank you! That’s good feedback. It’s there because the demo implies that it’s the demo of the same app, while in reality it’s a similar app targeting a different user base (a superficially Reddit-like peer to peer network). That’s why I say I have two apps, Aether and Aether Pro. The demo on the Aether Pro website is actually just regular Aether P2P.

I’ll try to find a way of making it less of a showstopper though - might be a better way to tell this.

Re: Electron 7.0

#103

Post by dewey »

rolleiflex wrote: post #99
dewey wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, and probably others, the main issue with Electron isn't the speed or even resource usage. It's that it ignores common UX/UI conventions you expect from a native app which still makes me prefer native macOS apps.

I agree with this. Unfortunately that’s a designer bottleneck rather than anything else. Think of it this way, if somebody ends up with a mess of an Electron app, he or she probably wouldn’t have fared any better in usability with a native app even if the UI would look superficially ‘in-spec’. Edit: Also as an example, Aether comes with plenty of shortcuts, or even has proper tabbing and tab highlighting for low-visi…

I wouldn't necessarily say it's just the way it looks, it's also how things work that you get for "free" when you use the native UI toolkit.

Examples would be shortcuts, tabbing through form fields, how a file explorer works and other small things. The file explorer in VSCode for example doesn't really behave like a native one, you have to manually refresh, you can't easily drag and drop and everything just feels a bit off.

Re: Electron 7.0

#104

Post by bluesroo »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #96
rolleiflex wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I release two apps, across 3 OSes, in somewhat of a bimonthly cadence with a low defect rate. That’s 6 different binaries. I’m a solo founder. I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist . It allows more people to try building more thing and that is a net positive. The speed problems and bloat issues of Electron is just shoddy programming on t…

I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist. Cool. With Electron your app will only work on Linux/Windows/MacOS. There are other cross-platform solutions.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box.

Re: Electron 7.0

#105

Post by inferiorhuman »

CDSlice wrote: post #100
inferiorhuman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist. Cool. With Electron your app will only work on Linux/Windows/MacOS. There are other cross-platform solutions.

What other PC OSs are there that actually gets used? BSDs?

What other PC OSs are there that actually gets used? BSDs?

Yes. Or Linux on non-x86 platforms.

Re: Electron 7.0

#106

Post by _bxg1 »

martin1975 wrote: post #89
_bxg1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really wouldn't. WebAssembly has nothing to do with the rendering engine, which is the bulk of Electron's footprint (and also the bulk of its apps' processing overhead). The latter can only be improved by Chromium devs (and is being improved constantly). The former requires that we come up with a way to share a single Chromium copy across apps. There's really no other way around it.

ironically, java applets provided via the JVM a way to run multiplatform, perhaps not all applets off a single JVM - I don't remember exactly if each java applet used its own JVM, but it wouldn't be a radical departure to have the JVM run multiple applets, cross platform, which is the entire reason the JVM was invented. Now instead of the JVM, we've these rather beefy runtimes due to Chrome, Node.JS, Javascript (v8).…

The key differences between Electron and Applets are:

1) Java applets were awful to use in the browser

2) The DOM is the most advanced and flexible (and, yes, resource-hungry) UI layout system ever created. Seriously. Swing didn't come close in terms of the sheer breadth of possible interfaces one could create.

Re: Electron 7.0

#107

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

CDSlice wrote: post #100
inferiorhuman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist. Cool. With Electron your app will only work on Linux/Windows/MacOS. There are other cross-platform solutions.

What other PC OSs are there that actually gets used? BSDs?

If you're bothering to include Linux in your list of Desktop platforms at all you may as well include the BSDs.

Besides, Java works fine on BSDs. Why is it that when modern developers reinvent the wheel they so often manage to do it worse than the last time?

Re: Electron 7.0

#108

Post by inferiorhuman »

bluesroo wrote: post #104
inferiorhuman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people like to rag on Electron, but without it, I wouldn’t be using something else, my apps just wouldn’t exist. Cool. With Electron your app will only work on Linux/Windows/MacOS. There are other cross-platform solutions.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box.

As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box.

Well as a user I've already dismissed your app out of hand. Congrats.

Re: Electron 7.0

#109

Post by Scarbutt »

scrollaway wrote: post #39
blux wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the comparison with Qt relevant? My understanding is that Electron is for JavaScript what Qt is for C++. Is there not a better fit for C++ development in the web UI ecosystem?

> My understanding is that Electron is for JavaScript what Qt is for C++. This is a weird comparison. Electron isn't really a UI framework, it's more of a customized web browser and JS runner, with some platform APIs to bridge the gap. But no, I don't know of anything serious that lets you write web UIs in C++. The closest you'll get are things like Google's Closure Compiler which compile Java to JS. There's very lik…

Closure compiles JS to JS, you must be thinking fo GWT.

Re: Electron 7.0

#110

Post by bitwize »

_bxg1 wrote: post #9
Razengan wrote: post #3

Since this is inevitably going to generate some discussion over native apps vs. Electron (ah there's already a fellow comment about it), I'd like to point out an example that is important to me of why Electron is an inferior experience for users: In the GitHub Desktop client, which is an Electron app, I can't spell check my commit messages, something that every text field in every native macOS app gets for free.

Web text fields should also support that functionality, so it may be a question of GitHub breaking/disabling it in some way.

It's probably a question of the 2010s equivalent of Windows custom control masturbation ("look mom, I can create my own buttons!"): replacing perfectly good HTML elements with ground-up reimplementations written in DIV soup with JavaScript event handlers.
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