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

Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#211

Post by mantas »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #149
gkya wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it Wut? So the whole Mac App Store, MS Office Suite, Adobe's apps, many other stuff were just a dream? Until Electron desktop was dead? You're bending facts here, and I hope that's because you don't know much about the stuff you're talking about. Desktop is big, just that other things have grown bigger. That doesn't…

I guess he meant Indie developers. I am one. I didn't care, but do now.

Eh? Indie developers thrived on Mac ecosystem for years.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#212

Post by maxsilver »

yesimahuman wrote: post #175
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify, Slack and Atom are no longer hip startups though - they're established applications, and at least two of them have a very lucrative monthly subscription model. They can afford to optimize.

But the user experience is already great, so what's the gain? Electron and the web clearly make a first class app platform on desktop. EDIT: thanks for the downvotes. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how electron is keeping Slack and Spotify from building a massive business and how their desktop users find the experience so bad they don't use the tools obsessively. Clearly there are things to improve w/ Electron (en…

As a paying customer, both Spotify and Slack are relativity shitty experiences.

I pay for both despite their poor quality software and bad UI/UX, not because of it.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#213

Post by addicted »

kenferry wrote: post #156
anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

> it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies What are you basing this on? There are plenty of iOS developers, and developing for Mac vs iOS is more similar than pretty much any two other dev platforms you can name.

Developing for Mac may = Developing for iOS.

Developing for Mac + Windows + Linux + Web > Developing for Electron.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#214

Post by dangoor »

There was some effort in the past to allow browsers to provide desktop app-like experiences for webapps. Progressive Web Apps are doing similar, though the target is very strongly toward mobile. It would be more efficient for disk space, though likely not CPU/RAM, to just make webapps be able to work more like desktop apps.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#215

Post by Asooka »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

The weird thing is I'm almost certain you can build the exact same thing with e.g. python+Qt, do literally all the drawing using python code in custom widgets, and the result would still be nicer to use than the status quo. I'm not advocating switching to the PyQt stack, I just want the electron stack to be saner, in particular

1) Electron is obviously a system library now. Treat it as such. Install ONE copy of electron per version, not ten private copies of electron in npm. It should be simple to integrate with at least Windows and OSX install systems - instead of downloading the full electron module, download an installer that installs the required version system-wide. This can be done as a step during installation like desktop programs have been installing required dependencies since the dawn of time.

2) Find some way to make it slimmer. Maybe not every app needs the entirety of the browser loaded. Maybe we can do lazy loading of certain components? Maybe optimise the most used critical paths, and provide tools to developers (if those don't already exist) to show exactly what is causing all those wakeups?

Moving off Electron is not an option any more, it's just such an easy and familiar platform to develop for, it's not going anywhere. Maybe we should accept it as the victor of the cross-platform desktop application toolkit and work to make it better. It's shitty, but it's the right kind of easy, like PHP.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#216

Post by bhauer »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #172
Veen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call "trade-offs" appears to me to be developers externalizing their costs onto users. There are costs to developing desktop applications and developers don't want to pay them, so they make users pay for them in wasted hardware dollars, bandwidth, RAM, battery life, and poor integration.

Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay. There may be an interesting economic lesson here: it really is not that easy to externalize costs. It surely can be done (air pollution), but it requires some special circumsta…

> Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay.

Precisely. I don't use Slack in part because its desktop application is irrationally bloated for its use-case. Although I have other reasons as well, they are enduring a cost--a small one to be sure, but presumably non-trivial in aggregate--in people refusing to use their service in part because their desktop application is poor.

But I do agree with the general emotion underlying the frustration of "externalities" here. As someone who advocates for high-performance and efficient web applications, I have toyed with the question of whether developers should confront the morality of wasting energy by having selected poor/low-performance platforms. Put in a somewhat comedic tone: low-performance software contributes to climate change.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#217

Post by Lagged2Death »

anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

People are making all kinds of great new apps, and more often than not, they come out on all three platforms. People are excited about the Desktop again...

You could have expressed pretty much the same sentiment about Java ~20 years ago. The trade-offs (high resource consumption, additional complexity, but less demanding of developer time) and even the fundamentals of the approach (an additional abstraction layer that works as a VM, APIs oriented around all the latest thinking) were also very similar.

Java is used for a lot of things, but mostly not as the basis of mass-market cross-platform applications the way it was originally intended.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#218

Post by agos »

carlosrg wrote: post #144
anaisbetts wrote: post #74

Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all". Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x…

Bullshit. Spotify, for example, existed before Electron, and it was very fast. Text editors existed before Electron, and they didn't require 300 MB minimum to run. Same with collaborative chat programs. Electron is just a way to reuse web developers for desktop development - I.e. a way companies now have to cut development costs.

aren't all tools a way to cut development costs?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#220

Post by dezzeus »

Actually, there was a long running discussion about making a runtime mode of Electron, in order to address many issues: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

I also recently joined the discussion with a more general idea which I (partially) expressed here: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673#issuecomment...

Post reply on HN