Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electron 7.0

electronjs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 289 posts

Re: Electron 7.0

#261

Post by pjmlp »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #92
flowerlad wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> OSes and frameworks have tried to solve this a bazillion ways. What is different today is that Windows 10 and other popular platforms adopted Flat UI. Users no longer expect apps to have “native look & feel” because Flat UI has no recognizable or desirable look & feel. This is a big mistake by Microsoft because there is no longer any reason for independent developers to write native Windows apps. This works to the…

Microsoft has made it pretty clear since about Windows 10 that they don't actually care about the Desktop anymore. It certainly isn't anywhere near their biggest money-maker.

Indeed, that is why Microsoft has created teams to support React Native for macOS and Windows, on Windows case it makes use of UWP, which new roadmap (WinUI 3.0) was announced at BUILD 2019, with more details to come up on Ignite.

Yeah, Microsoft bashing never grows old.

Re: Electron 7.0

#262

Post by pjmlp »

jagannathtech wrote: post #241
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,…

What is you opinion on flutter? esp performance wise?

A last attempt to try to rescue Dart from oblivion.

Re: Electron 7.0

#263

Post by pjmlp »

mangosherbet wrote: post #29

Is there a good introduction to starting development with Electron as someone who is a C++ developer? I find web development quite difficult to grok in general; lots of frameworks and technologies.

As C++ developer you are better served with Qt and QML.

Re: Electron 7.0

#264

Post by recklessplayer »

saagarjha wrote: post #167
httpsterio wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just last week I added shortcuts to our MacOS and Windows Electron app in about 15 minutes. I didn't read any documentation and I'm not even a developer, just a designer. I can barely make a proper if loop in js and I can't tell the difference between a method and a function either. Electron is sooo simple. I mean, we've run into some pretty interesting issues like with hardware acceleration and difference in color a…

There’s a lot more to getting an app to feel native than just shortcuts, unfortunately. A native platform toolkit will do the right thing for your platform, sometimes even if you don’t know what the right thing is or that it exists.

I completely agree with this. As a blind screen reader user, Electron apps are 90% inaccessible to me and other screen reader users. Screen readers (on any platform) interact with the underlying libraries/ frameworks. Every operating system supports its own native toolkit. It's a shame that Java's SWT framework fell out of favor for cross-platform software. That is quite accessible. Unfortunately, blind screen reader users are overlooked when it comes to these types of underlying frameworks.

Re: Electron 7.0

#265

Post by de_watcher »

rosybox wrote: post #83
headcanon wrote: post #2

Every time Electron is mentioned I bust out the popcorn for the inevitable hate spewed towards it: "Javascript is a terrible language and no one should use it" "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" "Qt is amazing and elegant and desktop-native. Why isn't everyone just using Qt?"

The problem with Qt I have is how incredibly expensive it is. Sure it's free if you want to build something open source, but you know some of us have to also make money to pay for being alive and it's hard to bootstrap an application if you have to pay $5,508 up front, per developer, and then again on an annual basis.

I can't fathom how do people still don't understand the licensing and keep posting FUD about it.

Every single time. How it's even possible?

No, you don't have to pay anything to build and sell your proprietary software built with Qt.

Re: Electron 7.0

#266

Post by 75dvtwin »

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,…

Well, I think the market is waiting for Qt.

What I would very much appreciate is:

QT-free (so that everything in that package is clearly LGPL) with React-native built on top of QT-free widgets.

That would make my day (and a year...)

Re: Electron 7.0

#267

Post by jcelerier »

75dvtwin wrote: post #266
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,…

Well, I think the market is waiting for Qt. What I would very much appreciate is: QT-free (so that everything in that package is clearly LGPL) with React-native built on top of QT-free widgets. That would make my day (and a year...)

> QT-free (so that everything in that package is clearly LGPL)

The immense majority of Qt is LGPL ; only these modules are GPL / commercial : https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons

> with React-native built on top of QT-free widgets.

https://blog.atulr.com/nodegui-intro/

though I still think that QtQuick (or even QtWidgets with https://www.kdab.com/declarative-widgets/) are much more readable and fast to market.

Re: Electron 7.0

#268

Post by nly »

rosybox wrote: post #83
headcanon wrote: post #2

Every time Electron is mentioned I bust out the popcorn for the inevitable hate spewed towards it: "Javascript is a terrible language and no one should use it" "Separate instances of chrome for every app is dumb and consumes too much memory" "Qt is amazing and elegant and desktop-native. Why isn't everyone just using Qt?"

The problem with Qt I have is how incredibly expensive it is. Sure it's free if you want to build something open source, but you know some of us have to also make money to pay for being alive and it's hard to bootstrap an application if you have to pay $5,508 up front, per developer, and then again on an annual basis.

I see this out of date myth on every HN page discussing Qt. The fact that people still don't know that Qt is LGPL is damaging.

Re: Electron 7.0

#269

Post by yodsanklai »

big_chungus wrote: post #216
yodsanklai wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electron is so heavy Does it matter? I think heaviness should be defined relatively to the computer resources. Currently VSCode memory usage is 75MB on my computer. It could be 10 times less, it wouldn't make any difference.

Which OS are you using for that kind of memory usage? I've tried it, and seen double that out-of-the-box.

Macbook Pro 2018, Catalina

Re: Electron 7.0

#270

Post by dewey »

marmada wrote: post #210
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.

To be honest, native MacOS UI doesn't even look good compared to the great styling you can get with HTML/CSS.

Native UI toolkits are not necessarily about looking beautiful for every app, they are about consistency, accessibility and letting the user expect how certain things work and can be found at. They have to fit to a lot of constrains that a single app doesn't have to.

Yes grey text on a white background can look great on a retina screen, but does it look good across the product range from the last 7 years and all devices, lighting conditions and for people with various disabilities?

Post reply on HN