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Portal Windows for Electron

blog.tandem.chat

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Re: Portal Windows for Electron

#31

Post by q-rews »

tfsh wrote: post #13
smoldesu wrote: post #3

The current version being shown off here is extremely stuttery, is there a way to smooth the animation yet?

This is a constraint of the APIs provided by MacOS, they allow you to position by (x,y) coordinate and resize by width/height, but there's no way to tween these values...and nor should there be. What's Tandem are doing here is (interesting, but) atypical behaviour.

I don’t think that's entirely correct. While you can't ask the OS to tween the values, nothing prevents you from doing that, other than likely a reduced frame rate.

See this demo: http://stewd.io/pong/

It's still not 100% smooth, but it seems slightly better and demonstrates the ability to manually tween values. Similar performance in both Chrome and Safari.

Re: Portal Windows for Electron

#32

Post by 10000truths »

adamdusty wrote: post #29
egypturnash wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- you want to make sure that people respect the importance of your app by not running it along with everything else because it needs 10x the amount of resources a native app would

Users don't care anymore. Phones have 12GB of RAM. A $500 laptop will have plenty of RAM, CPU power, and storage for the average user to not even notice anything. HN and reddit are the only ones who can't seem to grasp the idea that it's not 1995 anymore, and apps taking even 1-2 GB of RAM isn't that big of a deal for the average user. Do I want my CAD software as an electron app. Obviously not, but for most applicat…

Sure, if you constrain “average user” to America. If you go to other places like India, where people don’t have $500 lying around to drop on the latest notebook, you’ll find a lot of repurposed laptops that have several-year-old specs still finding active use. Machines with 2 GB RAM and 250 GB spinning rust are not as uncommon as you might think.

And sure, if you just run one app and that’s it, you might get away with acceptable performance. But now try to install it over slow or metered Internet. Try to run it alongside Chrome/Discord/Eclipse/Spotify/Android Studio. Try to install all those apps without chewing up your disk space. These aren’t hypothetical scenarios, these are very real usability concerns.

Re: Portal Windows for Electron

#33

Post by Y-bar »

stnmtn wrote: post #28
vxNsr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in, their app is really bad all around? Totally agree.

Ha, I meant it in the opposite way, that it avoids making either mistake. Yes, it consumes a lot of resources, but it's success has proven that users don't mind this as much as commenters on hacker news seem to. And it's a program that is slick, intuitive, and supports so, so many use cases without ever feeling overloading.

Disagree fully. As an app I feel Discord is slow (on an Intel 9700K), clunky, and not really intuitive. Just the text input delay is noticeably slower than example Word or Sublime text.

I'm only member of 6 channels and have maybe only that many private messages open at a time, maybe it becomes more intuitive it there are more? But I don't understand how that would be.

One thing that is extra annoying is that the settings window can't be a separate window, so every time I have to adjust audio settings I get muted and lose the chat focus.

Re: Portal Windows for Electron

#34

Post by smoldesu »

Y-bar wrote: post #33
stnmtn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I meant it in the opposite way, that it avoids making either mistake. Yes, it consumes a lot of resources, but it's success has proven that users don't mind this as much as commenters on hacker news seem to. And it's a program that is slick, intuitive, and supports so, so many use cases without ever feeling overloading.

Disagree fully. As an app I feel Discord is slow (on an Intel 9700K), clunky, and not really intuitive. Just the text input delay is noticeably slower than example Word or Sublime text. I'm only member of 6 channels and have maybe only that many private messages open at a time, maybe it becomes more intuitive it there are more? But I don't understand how that would be. One thing that is extra annoying is that the set…

I'm using Discord (with BetterDiscord and a CSS theme overtop) on an i5 4460, and I can barely notice any latency when typing. The only time when I can get input latency past 100ms is when I'm rendering something in Blender, or have a high-CPU game running in the foreground.

Re: Portal Windows for Electron

#35

Post by kroltan »

Y-bar wrote: post #33
stnmtn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I meant it in the opposite way, that it avoids making either mistake. Yes, it consumes a lot of resources, but it's success has proven that users don't mind this as much as commenters on hacker news seem to. And it's a program that is slick, intuitive, and supports so, so many use cases without ever feeling overloading.

Disagree fully. As an app I feel Discord is slow (on an Intel 9700K), clunky, and not really intuitive. Just the text input delay is noticeably slower than example Word or Sublime text. I'm only member of 6 channels and have maybe only that many private messages open at a time, maybe it becomes more intuitive it there are more? But I don't understand how that would be. One thing that is extra annoying is that the set…

Over-100-server lurker here. I majoritarily use servers, not DMs, and could see why people that use a lot of DMs would find the layout inconvenient.

I think the UI mostly makes sense, it has a hierarchy from left to right, so it is essentially a amped-up tree-view. You could argue for actually using a tree view (a la TeamSpeak), at least on desktop, and I wouldn't disagree, but it kind of makes sense given parity with the mobile app.

I don't see a need for minimal input delay for text, compared to a code editor, as when writing natural languages, they are mostly formed in sentences and therefore have a lot of "buffer" in my brain, I don't need a closed feedback loop to type. Suppose that someone that relies on that would be rightfully befuddled with any delay.

It uses 156 megabytes of memory even on this high-volume scenario, so I would say that while baseline performance is low, it doesn't get slower, which is good.

That being said, I can always find what I want in the UI, it is rather internally consistent. The voice features are excellent and it has less outages than Slack, in my experience!

Re: Portal Windows for Electron

#36

Post by [deleted] »

afavour wrote: post #8
0xDEEPFAC wrote: post #2

Why not just write a native application?

Because it's cheaper, quicker and the vast majority of users are fine with it. I'm not excusing it, I curse Slack every day I have to use their Electron app (though mostly just use it in a browser tab now) but we have this exact same conversation every time anything about Electron is posted on HN. None of the parameters for making the choice have changed since the last time we did.

[deleted]

Re: Portal Windows for Electron

#37

Post by nyanpasu64 »

stnmtn wrote: post #28
vxNsr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in, their app is really bad all around? Totally agree.

Ha, I meant it in the opposite way, that it avoids making either mistake. Yes, it consumes a lot of resources, but it's success has proven that users don't mind this as much as commenters on hacker news seem to. And it's a program that is slick, intuitive, and supports so, so many use cases without ever feeling overloading.

The UI is getting worse, as they overload existing UI elements with new functionality. On mobile, they replaced the "recent mentions" button with a "stages" button (I don't use stages), making it harder to look for recent mentions just to promote their Clubhouse clone. On desktop, they replaced the "upload image" button with a button to open a "upload image or create thread" menu (I find Discord's implementation of threads to be half-baked, threads expire quickly unlike forum threads, you have to pay to reduce expiration, and they override server-wide mutes). You have to double-click to skip the menu.

Not to mention stuffing their UI with payment prompts left and right, showing emotes you can't use in the emote menu, replacing useful screen estate with "get nitro" and "boost servers" buttons.

Re: Portal Windows for Electron

#38

Post by [deleted] »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #16
0xDEEPFAC wrote: post #2

Why not just write a native application?

No, really why not write a native application? If I'm understanding it correctly, Electron is depending on third-party libraries like Portal Windows to get functionality like "create new windows, treat them as objects, and poke around in them" which comes for free in single-process GUI libraries like Qt.

[deleted]

Re: Portal Windows for Electron

#40

Post by CyberDildonics »

afavour wrote: post #8
0xDEEPFAC wrote: post #2

Why not just write a native application?

Because it's cheaper, quicker and the vast majority of users are fine with it. I'm not excusing it, I curse Slack every day I have to use their Electron app (though mostly just use it in a browser tab now) but we have this exact same conversation every time anything about Electron is posted on HN. None of the parameters for making the choice have changed since the last time we did.

The real reason is that the people making electron apps don't know how to make stuff in C++ and don't want to try. This might be a little more excusable before C++11 or if trying to avoid MFC and/or doing everything with win32, but modern C++ and GUI libraries like FLTK, Juce, Qt, etc. are a pretty great way to make something. A FLTK program can start at 100KB without dependencies.
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