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…
> As a user, I don’t care about the dev’s challenge of supporting multiple OS’s
As a user I do care about that. A big selling point of vscode versus emacs for me is that it works "natively" on both Windows and Linux. Finally, I don't need to run a VM just to run emacs. I tried all the other alternatives like Msys2 and cygwin, but they're like their own circle of hell as soon as you need to run executables and all the extensions assume you're on Linux.
VS Code has some of the worst product quality I've seen from Microsoft in quite a while. It doesn't hold a candle to IntelliJ or Visual Studio. Even directly comparable "lightweight" editors like ISE are far superior. Random examples of bad behaviour in commonly used parts that would affect just about every user: If you try to search & replace, it'll refuse to remember "replace in selection". It'll reset every time,…
Every tools takes getting used to and learning it's quirks. Where there are problems within VS Code, there will be different problems in IntelliJ. I quite like VS Code while disliking IntelliJ. Same old story of differing preferences. > Someone thought that manually editing JSON files is a suitable GUI for configuring basic settings. There has been a GUI editor for settings for a while now, as well as the JSON editor…
VS Code has improved so much in such a short period of time, if people are comparing to a 6 months ago there has been endless improvements. I really like Intellij, think it's great as well, but it makes you do things in certain way depending on what language you're using. After learning how VS Code works you can use it however you want with whatever language you want.
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…
On principle I agree that GUI consistency is something that should be striven for, however when I look at the success of the web and apps, all of which have extremely non-uniform designs, it seems like the users really just don’t care and seem to be able to adapt to anything. That’s not to say they are power users; most users seem to be interested only in the bare minimum needed to do what they want, which doesn’t require mastery.
Overall, it seems like the success of the web and apps has mostly overturned the design principles that so many hold dear, and the world isn’t burning because of it.
VS Code is my favourite software of all time, no need to use the menu bar with the command pallete and the excellent custom keybinds. It completely gets out of the way it is still more feature rich than any IDE through extensions. A blinking cursor is a small price to pay, I haven't even noticed that. I know it's not meant to be good being written in mostly TypeScript, but it just is.
> VS Code ... is still more feature rich than any IDE through extensions. Not sure what you program in, but that has not been my experience at all. C# (Unity), Golang, Python have pretty mediocre support at best in VS Code. What JetBrains' products do there is miles ahead, and tacking on countless extensions doesn't get you close to the out of the box experience, so I fail to see the point. If I'm quickly editing a s…
I program mainly in Go, Python, TypeScript and some C/C++. A year ago I would have agreed with you, but one extension for each language now gives you almost everything you need. I bounce back to Goland, Webstorm, CLion and PyCharm occasionally as they have much more reliable refactoring, and have some really nice features missing from VS Code, but being a Polyglot VS Code makes it so much easier to use similar keybindings and processes across languages, I don't have to fight the IDE to get it to do what I want. Both great tools but my daily driver became VS Code a few months ago, it's pulled ahead in my opinion despite being free.
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…
> As a user, I don’t care about the dev’s challenge of supporting multiple OS’s As a user I do care about that. A big selling point of vscode versus emacs for me is that it works "natively" on both Windows and Linux. Finally, I don't need to run a VM just to run emacs. I tried all the other alternatives like Msys2 and cygwin, but they're like their own circle of hell as soon as you need to run executables and all the…
They didn't say they don't care about results.
The VS Code developers worked to make it what it is. Sublime Text shows it isn't about the technology. Emacs is just from a culture where non Unix and proprietary operating systems are 2nd class.
I've been saying a a version of this (the browser will eat the OS) for a few years now, really as soon as I heard about WASM. 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…
Windows 11 builds are already leaking.
It was announced and released (as an insiders update).
Electron seems to have reached the status of being a political topic. For many people it's something to rally around or (more frequently here) against. You're either for it or against it. The above arguments would not be taken seriously on another topic, but here their weakness can be overlooked (by some) since folks are already committed to the the stance they support. Look at the argument more closely: they're nami…
These are not "random bugs" but deeply established Mac UI conventions. My point is not "Electron apps are buggy," it's that they are undermining an established set of UI conventions, without advancing a replacement. There's a virtuous cycle when apps use a platform's native components: apps get the standard UI behaviors for free, users can bring their knowledge from one app to another, and the platform owner can enha…
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…
Yes, I understand that. The applications I’m thinking of are those that either have a longer shelf-life and/or are business applications. In Finance, for example, many important vendors have been rolling-out trading front-ends based on web frameworks (maybe Electron for all I know). They are absolutely terrible, again, because of the lack of standard UI usability rules. Combine that with very poor documentation, and…
I emphatically agree with that. My complaint is that it feels like a hopeless battle to try and write good native desktop software today. Every year the OS's APIs and UI change... that means weeks or months tweaking your project every year until you end-of-life your app.
I think you exaggerate. Some native apps I use were last updated 5 or 10 years ago.
I always thought that deploying web apps as desktop apps is a great thing to do. As in, not bunch it up into electron, but using shell scripting to start a local only web server and send a command to the OS to open a localhost page. The advantages are that you don't need bloated software to do stuff, you have the full power of the OS, because you have a local webserver running, you have access to the file system, etc…
Almost nobody argues that Web application is easier option for developer. As a user I don't want 500M program to do the same what 30M program did before. It is a real example my company is replacing WebEx with MS Teams. And it is not a single program, more and more like those. Electron is "bloated software".
Usability is another issue: web UI elements appears from nowhere, there is no single way to find where is settings button...