There's also the benefits of things like this - You want an app that supports the new Apple silicon? tadaaa most of the work's done for you already - https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron-11-0
Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
31–40 of 127 posts
Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
#32This resumes the desktop app development drama.
I hope Flutter will solve that
Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
#33Shameless self-promotion: I built Video Hub App using Electron and Angular. It allowed me with virtually 0 new learning build a cross-platform app in a few months. Currently I sell about 100 copies per month (and donate $350 of it to charity). Public: https://videohubapp.com/ GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App ps - and I have a free file renamer made in Electron and Angular: https://yboris.dev/renamer/
Your filmstrip view looks pretty cool. Nice work!
Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Learning takes time and effort, and the more general the tool I use the better. I mean, you could have just written this. It's fine you don't want to learn anything new, but it makes your judgement suspect - hence the "Wayland vs X" confusion.
No, I do want to learn things, but the choice is simple, you either: 1. Learn Electron and implement an app, publish to all platforms. 2. Choose your target OS, learn the native toolkit, implement the app, switch to other OS, implement again, rinse and repeat for all, and in the case of linux you have to deal with multiple toolkits and you have to know the quirks around Wayland support (with electron you don't necess…
This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of cross-platform toolkits that are far leaner than electron.
Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
#35I understand performance concerns, but not "native" app. Most popular thing on desktop used by people are Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Gmail and Google Calendar, Reddit, Netflix, Wikipedia. I have never seen people avoiding them, because they don't have a native interface. As long as interface is intutive, people are happy to use them.
I miss the apps of the XP era, where people actually experimented and did some novel things with UI. Everything is very boring, and there's nothing like a WinAmp skin in sight.
Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
#36No matter how much I hate the bloat, and no matter how much I don't like JavaScript as and language due to it's behaviour around type coercion, I can't help it but to agree with everything in this article. Reusing the frontend skills I learned throughout the years to build desktop apps when needed, instead of having to learn an OS toolkit (and in the case of linux, multiple desktop environments, neve mind Wayland vs…
Werid. You hate the language and the bloat, but you still would choose Electron over something like Lazarus?
In a heartbeat.
The fact of the matter is, ecosystem trumps everything else. For UX development, nothing comes close to javascript. The language may suck, npm is somewhat of a trainwreck, and yet, if you want any sort of esoteric component, you'll find it in JS.
It's got so many tools that it simply isn't uncommon for newer desktop apps to have embedded browser in them as an option.
Want proof?
- Show me a Lazarus native flamegraph.
- Show me a Lazarus graph library that comes close to D3
- Show me a Lazarus date picker :D
Yeah, I hate the language. I even hate parts of the ecosystem (is-even... WTF?!?!?!). However, you just have to admit that nothing comes close to the tools and widgets you get for free by adopting js. It was built for UX.
Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
#37This is the entire reason Electron is so popular, and generally users love these apps and don't care about whether apps use native OS controls. This is the same approach Capacitor takes for mobile. Being able to use your existing frontend skills and access the existing web dev market is really compelling.
Users love functionality provided by those apps, not the fact they were made with Electron for business reason.
People love Discord. On a desktop they have no choice but to use its Electron client. Some people love Skype, but I guess not one of them wanted for native Skype to migrate to Electron. The list goes on.
Electron app developers are dime a dozen, comparing to native app developers. That's the biggest driver behind Electron popularity: business decision.
Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Werid. You hate the language and the bloat, but you still would choose Electron over something like Lazarus?
> Reusing to the frontend skills I learned throughout the years Not weird at all.
Oops, had and typo there, meant to say: reusing the frontend skills... what is weird about that?
Here's another example: GNOME shell uses JavaScript and CSS, and it's pretty straightforward to understand. Was looking at the code of a plugin to hide the workspace switcher popup and tried a few things to instead reduce the animation time to something that does not necessarity stick around over my windows too long to bother me when I want to view the content beneath. Took and few hours but I got it configured decently, and "live reloaded" it to get the effect instantly. Here I reused my JavaScript knowledge to solve it; if it wasn't so easy due to my previous unrelated knowledge I probably wouldn't have invested any time in it.
Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Learning takes time and effort, and the more general the tool I use the better. I mean, you could have just written this. It's fine you don't want to learn anything new, but it makes your judgement suspect - hence the "Wayland vs X" confusion.
No, I do want to learn things, but the choice is simple, you either: 1. Learn Electron and implement an app, publish to all platforms. 2. Choose your target OS, learn the native toolkit, implement the app, switch to other OS, implement again, rinse and repeat for all, and in the case of linux you have to deal with multiple toolkits and you have to know the quirks around Wayland support (with electron you don't necess…
You keep mentioning Wayland as if it is the magic keyword that will strike fear into the heart of native app developers. That's just not a thing, it won't matter at all for your app.
The irony is that if you write a desktop app at one point, you will soon learn about all the things that Chromium doesn't do for you. Want to run some kind of privileged operation (since disk benchmarks came up)? Tough luck, there is no special pass for you on macOS just cause it's Chromium. And with the app sandbox, there are now lots of things that are privileged. This story repeats ten times for every OS you want to support, regardless of using CSS for your UI chrome.
Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I do want to learn things, but the choice is simple, you either: 1. Learn Electron and implement an app, publish to all platforms. 2. Choose your target OS, learn the native toolkit, implement the app, switch to other OS, implement again, rinse and repeat for all, and in the case of linux you have to deal with multiple toolkits and you have to know the quirks around Wayland support (with electron you don't necess…
This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of cross-platform toolkits that are far leaner than electron.
Can you please give me a list of examples I can evaluate myslef and decide if it's worth spending my time learning instead of going the Electron route?