41–50 of 74 posts
Please forgive the simple question, but... Why does this exist? Is creating desktop programs out of HTML code really a good idea?
Because working with things like GTK and QT is horrible compared to working with HTML/JS/CSS, for anything other than trivial things. That said, it'd be cool to have native code generation from this though.
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Because NodeJS is popular and desktop apps were getting small and efficient so we crammed a 30MB Chrome runtime in there.
Actually it's more like this: That ugly language called Javascript that everyone derided and said was "too shit and slow to ever write a Demo in" back in the 90s when all the "real developers" were writing server side scripts in Perl and left the frontend people to their own devices caught up with them. They kept pushing the boundaries, discovering things like XMLHttpRequest, and using that crap little language. Even…
Man it's great to see effort being put into a platform-sensitive React component set. We've been working on React components for N1, and it'd be cool to swap them out for an open source set one day. The thing is, I'm not sure 100% native appearance is the way to go. I think Spotify nailed a cross-platform desktop experience using a UI that is distinctly non-native. For folks just learning about Electron / web-based d…
Didn't we go round this with Java? Round 1: AWT. Uses the native widgets. Therefore the layout is slightly different on different platforms. Round 2: Swing. Cross-platform identical, and therefore looks nothing like native apps. You could 'skin' it, at which point it would look native but behave subtly differently. Round 3: SWT. Back to native widgets for Eclipse. Round 4: Everyone throws up their hands in despair an…
Please forgive the simple question, but... Why does this exist? Is creating desktop programs out of HTML code really a good idea?
Because NodeJS is popular and desktop apps were getting small and efficient so we crammed a 30MB Chrome runtime in there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 With all respect to leichzeit0 comment, IMHO, JS is an ugly language, with way too many pitfalls [0]. Even big boys [1] use CoffeScript to transpile into JS. JS for cross platform desktop development may be an easy thing to manage, though it can become unusable and clunky super fast. You can spot JS desktop apps, just by the size of executable, which is at least 5-10 times bigger than you could expect (Spotify - 1…
I'm going to elaborate on your comment a bit because this infuriates me and I don't think people truly understand the reasons behind why web-apps-for-desktop generally suck and there's nothing you can do to fix it in yours. Background: I'm the lead dev/UX on LXQt, a linux desktop environment ( http://lxqt.org/ ). First one that comes to mind is accessibility and consistency of interactions. Apps that do not respect a…
QML appears to offer the best of both worlds - I don't understand why it isn't more popular?
sometimes you just want an app to look decent by default not unique.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 With all respect to leichzeit0 comment, IMHO, JS is an ugly language, with way too many pitfalls [0]. Even big boys [1] use CoffeScript to transpile into JS. JS for cross platform desktop development may be an easy thing to manage, though it can become unusable and clunky super fast. You can spot JS desktop apps, just by the size of executable, which is at least 5-10 times bigger than you could expect (Spotify - 1…
>> "JS is an ugly language" >> "riddled with complex JS" If you pick a technology by the aesthetics of the language, I'm pretty sure you'll make a bad decision no matter what. Not you like in you, but in principle. :) The code is clean if you write it well. Ugly code comes in all parentheses positions.
What I meant:
> "JS is an ugly language, with way too many pitfalls."
IMHO it's ugly from 'within', just look at the JS truth table [1] and video I linked with the quote [2]. I just feel that I have no control of what I am doing with JS.
It's quite a paradox, that new people to programming, can get start quick with JS, though are not repelled how easily you can shoot yourself in the foot with it. But maybe they just do not catch the errors..
[1] https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20BySC_6HyY
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Because working with things like GTK and QT is horrible compared to working with HTML/JS/CSS, for anything other than trivial things. That said, it'd be cool to have native code generation from this though.
Have you used Qt and QML? For me it's much more productive and straightforward than html/js/css. Delarative legible ui with built in dataflow/reactive properties. Performs straight out of the box without having figure out how to work with the mechanisms buried in this hugely complex and opaque machine called a browser. In fact its a relief to work with it. Could you say where you think its so 'horrible'.
I'm a fan of React, but I have no desire to use it outside of the web, and maybe mobile (still on the fence there). For desktop, we have QT, which is truly an awesome native widget toolkit, with many thousands of man-years work in it, excellent cross-platform desktop coverage, along with pretty good accessibility standards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to elaborate on your comment a bit because this infuriates me and I don't think people truly understand the reasons behind why web-apps-for-desktop generally suck and there's nothing you can do to fix it in yours. Background: I'm the lead dev/UX on LXQt, a linux desktop environment ( http://lxqt.org/ ). First one that comes to mind is accessibility and consistency of interactions. Apps that do not respect a…
This! I don't particularly care what technology people use to write apps, so long as it works well . As others in this thread have said, you can immediately spot a web-app-pretending-to-be-native because it doesn't work well . QML appears to offer the best of both worlds - I don't understand why it isn't more popular?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't we go round this with Java? Round 1: AWT. Uses the native widgets. Therefore the layout is slightly different on different platforms. Round 2: Swing. Cross-platform identical, and therefore looks nothing like native apps. You could 'skin' it, at which point it would look native but behave subtly differently. Round 3: SWT. Back to native widgets for Eclipse. Round 4: Everyone throws up their hands in despair an…
Not that I'm a big fan of Java, but it really feels like people threw Java under the bus only to reinvent it all in JavaScript.