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React Native for Windows and Mac

microsoft.github.io

391–400 of 505 posts

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an end user why do I care about "openness"? If I pay a premium for my platform, why would I want second rate cross platform software? Falsehoods HNers believe about how people buy/use software. Didn't stop Slack/Discord from become ubiquitous. "But native tho" just becomes a circlejerk. Talking about what users care about, most people don't know what native means nor if a given app is it. They don't know if Zoom…

I remember when Spotify 'upgraded' from a native to a js application on MacOS. It bricked my wife's computer. She never installed Spotify again. This is someone who doesn't usually care about software. She did care about that annoyance.

If Spotify bricked her computer, it was an issue with computer, not Spotify. It just so happened that you installed Spotify before the computer was bricked. If Spotify did that, you’d have heard stories of other Macs just completely dying out there if this was an actual issue.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#392
While personally I dislike React Native in the strongest terms possible for the number of nigh impossible to debug technical issues it has brought the projects that tried to tame it, there is a really interesting moment happening here. Microsoft is embracing Facebook's cross-platform tools to eventually compete with Google's cross-platform Electron. Microsoft currently relies on Google for the internals of VS Code, Github for Desktop and many more of its popular pieces of kit, and it doesn't seem very happy about it.

My own experience with React Native has been nothing but terrible, but it will be interesting to see how all of this will play out in the long run.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I pay a premium for my platform, why would I want second rate cross platform software? Are you paying for your software or getting whatever you can find for free? If you are paying, is the software's leanness something you value - that is, will you buy some software because it is leaner over some other software that is heavier? Would that be even if the heavier software has more features? What sort of software h…

As far as desktop software, the only software I pay for are subscriptions to Office 365 and JetBrains R#. I don’t really use my personal computer for too much of anything besides Office and a Plex server - I paid for a Plex Pass solely to support the developer. On mobile, I’ll pay to remove ads and I won’t use any software or games where I can’t remove ads. With the economy in the crapper, I’m starting to voluntarily…

This is funny because you just listed a bunch of cross platform software.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#394
I wish someone would take a web renderer, took the Javascript away, made a native react-like library for it, and made a universal interface to it so any language could use it. That would finally fix the problem with the UI building issue, while allowing flexible language access. That would be the best of both worlds.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#395
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it would be less bloated, it's impossible for a layer on top of native to be less bloated. That's not to say it couldn't be efficient, and efficiency in development time is the key factor. It can be a nightmare to manage apps across different platforms, frameworks and languages. RN could be massively improved, but the concept is a godsend.

Why would I as end user care about developer efficiency?

Because if you as a developer only develops for a single platform and that platform isn’t the one I’m using at the moment, your product is useless for me.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#396

While personally I dislike React Native in the strongest terms possible for the number of nigh impossible to debug technical issues it has brought the projects that tried to tame it, there is a really interesting moment happening here. Microsoft is embracing Facebook's cross-platform tools to eventually compete with Google's cross-platform Electron. Microsoft currently relies on Google for the internals of VS Code, G…

V8, Chromium and Blink are an Open Source projects that Google is one of the main contributors to, but they're not 'Google'.

If Google went away tomorrow, V8, Chromium and Blink would still exist, and Microsoft would be able to use all projects.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#397
post #347

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As someone just getting into mobile development, I've enjoyed using it significantly more than native iOS/Android. It's so much faster and more straightforward to spin up designs,

If you know native at the same level, RN is in now way faster.

I don’t know anyone that is equally proficient in Android and iOS development at any high level.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#398
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who just spent 5 minutes chasing moving nodes round in that graph looking for leftpad.js?

Why don't people copy the deb-tree to their local repo and/or pin the version that they want, so that they can be free of node terrorists? EDIT: To be clear - maybe I am REALLY old-school, but every time we did a release, we archived our tool-chain (GCC blah blah, Make blah blah, bash blah blah), our depencies, our vendor libraries and our code, so that IF in 20 years, if we had to rebuild a particular release (12.x)…

"if your a dad, yes, doh!"

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#399

While personally I dislike React Native in the strongest terms possible for the number of nigh impossible to debug technical issues it has brought the projects that tried to tame it, there is a really interesting moment happening here. Microsoft is embracing Facebook's cross-platform tools to eventually compete with Google's cross-platform Electron. Microsoft currently relies on Google for the internals of VS Code, G…

Fascinating that your experience has been the opposite of mine. Did you do native app development before trying react-native?

My unconventional take is the real gains from react-native come from converting existing native projects, while leaving as much native code intact as possible.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#400
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be misinformed; according to https://medium.com/flutter/hummingbird-building-flutter-for-... Flutter for Web uses HTML & CSS where it can, and falls back to Canvas where it can't. Flutter for Web is still on Beta, so lets see where it lands. Today, it seems to implement some PWA practices and lazyloading to try and get some performance.

Well that article is from 2018 and kind of overemphasises the HTML and CSS where it can. Checkout the official [1] Flutter web demos. Even the simplest [2] example renders basically every part of the UI (including text!!) within canvas elements, which is a bit crazy to me... but yes it's still Beta, so we'll see what they can improve [1] https://flutter.github.io/samples/#?platform=web [2] https://flutter.github.io/s…

They also create a thousand webcomponent wrappers to display this.
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