31–40 of 163 posts
The usual retort is "people use Electron because they only know web technologies". No, it's not only that. I've been programming GUI apps for 30 years, going through TurboVision, Delphi, MFC, WinForms, wxWidgets, Qt, WPF, native Android/iPhone, and probably 2 more I forgot about. They all suck terribly when compared to React/Vue/HTML/CSS. Creating a GUI app with web tech it's just so much more productive. It's like c…
Why is the post focusing exclusively on desktop? > The last five applications I installed are Electron apps. The last few companies I've worked at made their mobile apps using React Native[1]. > In ten years nearly every desktop app that isn't over ten years old will be a progressive web app or a containerized (e.g. Electron) web app. Some of the apps I have installed on my phone are progressive apps, one of those de…
React Native is much more native than Electron, though. There’s no “web” involved in React Native. It just happens that the language (JavaScript) is also used by the web platform.
Just worth noting that it's not just JavaScript that makes it web-developer-friendly though, it's also its HTML-like templating system and its CSS-like styling system.
The usual retort is "people use Electron because they only know web technologies". No, it's not only that. I've been programming GUI apps for 30 years, going through TurboVision, Delphi, MFC, WinForms, wxWidgets, Qt, WPF, native Android/iPhone, and probably 2 more I forgot about. They all suck terribly when compared to React/Vue/HTML/CSS. Creating a GUI app with web tech it's just so much more productive. It's like c…
I've written apps in Python and regret it. The pain of packaging to end users, the 20-30 megabytes of OpenBLAS to get NumPy to get vectorized operations on the same order of magnitude as fast as a C++ loop, the dependence on prebuilt wheels and inability to write fast C/C++ code without foisting a dependency on a C++ compiler on your users (unless you have a Windows, Linux, and Mac machine to build wheels yourself), the lack of multithreaded parallelism... From observing a JS audio app being developed, they're also struggling with the inability to write C/C++ code without foisting a dependency on a C++ compiler on your users (unless the developers build native packages themselves), dependence on upstream fixing bugs rather than being able to fix the bugs themselves, and download sizes of over 50 megabytes zipped, plus recurring packaging issues where the native libraries don't run properly on user machines.
Right now I am working on a side project in Flutter, it is in the very early stages but the ability to target multiple platforms, web, multiple desktop environments, multiple mobile platforms from a fairly singular code base is rather interesting. This makes good commercial sense, in practical thinking speeds up development and release. Yep issues may arise.
I would not hesitate to say that for many users the average users that web based apps, either browser based or electron or whatever are suitable in a lot of cases. There are some cases where this does not make sense currently, like computational (although), video/audio editing, etc. However look at tools like Google Colab where machine learning is being pushed server side because of the power of 3rd party infrastructure.
The web just makes sense in a lot of cases. Ease of development, maintainability, cost, UI, accessibility (availability).
The webification of Desktop app GUI’s is the result of a total disregard for usability .. from a user’s point-of-view (not a developer’s point-of-view of what users >should As a user, I don’t care about the dev’s challenge of supporting multiple OS’s. These best experience comes when I load up a new application and can intuitively navigate it without the mental overload required trying to decipher a GUI layout which…
Also when it comes to usability, users prefer having a consistent UI over a "native" UI, especially as the number of devices have exploded between laptops, phones and tablets. Slack looks and works the same everywhere, and that's one of it's advantages.
Electron is a large step backwards in usability and software quality. Spotify has its own context menus which don't support arrow keys or type select. GitHub Desktop has a "Select All" which doesn't actually Select All, only what's been paged in. VSCode doesn't confirm key equivalents by highlighting the menu bar. All of them blink the cursor even without typing focus. All of them steal focus at launch. Our UI vocabu…
How does security factor into this? Seems like we keep exposing more and more data to networks while at the same time collecting more and more data on everyone. It doesn't seem like a great combination for those who have to protect this data nor for those who will be the most harmed if it gets out (the folks the data is about, not the companies that leaked it).
The usual retort is "people use Electron because they only know web technologies". No, it's not only that. I've been programming GUI apps for 30 years, going through TurboVision, Delphi, MFC, WinForms, wxWidgets, Qt, WPF, native Android/iPhone, and probably 2 more I forgot about. They all suck terribly when compared to React/Vue/HTML/CSS. Creating a GUI app with web tech it's just so much more productive. It's like c…
So, if I have, say, Python as my scripting language for that tool, how do I alter the UI?
The only program that gets this right is Blender. And they had to build their own UI toolkit from scratch to do it.
The webification of Desktop app GUI’s is the result of a total disregard for usability .. from a user’s point-of-view (not a developer’s point-of-view of what users >should As a user, I don’t care about the dev’s challenge of supporting multiple OS’s. These best experience comes when I load up a new application and can intuitively navigate it without the mental overload required trying to decipher a GUI layout which…
I agree that there's a lot of form-over-function and bad usability decisions in apps but that's completely separate from the underlying frameworks and distribution technology. You can have great webapps and terrible native apps. Also when it comes to usability, users prefer having a consistent UI over a "native" UI, especially as the number of devices have exploded between laptops, phones and tablets. Slack looks and…
Once the executives learn that they can deliver binary blobs through the browser, that's the end game for the current distribution model. Piracy will be crippled at the knees and everything will become SaaS.
Microsoft has signaled towards this direction when they talked about 10 being the last version of the OS, and the Office suite slowly porting more features to Office 365. Have you seen how aggressive the OneDrive nags have become recently?
I fear for a world where PC's more closely resemble Chromebooks than the traditional offline first binary model of today. I can see the benefits this could bring to an end user, but I personally feel the price of freedom and privacy is too high.