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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com

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Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#511

Post by easuter »

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…

> Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it

What a load of tripe.

Try stuffing all the functionality of a large enterprise desktop app like SAP or Siebel into Electron and let me know how well that goes.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#512

Post by infogulch »

kungtotte wrote: post #483
pluma wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've switched from Sublime Text 3 (native) to VSCode (Electron) and I couldn't be happier. If I didn't know it's electron based I wouldn't have been able to tell as a user. YMMV so don't generalise.

When did you switch? Atom was damned near unusable around 1.0, and VSCode was only a little better. The difference to now is night and day.

Atom and VSCode are in different leagues with respect to performance, and the difference is growing with time. If you think the reason that Atom is slow is because of Electron, VSCode is the counterexample.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#514

Post by cr0sh »

lerpa wrote: post #427
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, only a special kind of "developers" is afraid of learning languages. A language is, after all, means to use the frameworks. If you are an experienced developer, moving from a language to a language is a matter of hours to days, depending on paradigm changes. Learning frameworks takes much longer, obviously, but with the wealth of information available out there these days (Stack Overflow, message boards, blo…

Spot on, I serioulsly don't understand people that are Java developers / front-end developers / technology X devs if you're not talking about you're currently working on, and instead treat that as their profession. Anyone would think it to be ridiculous if a carpenter told you he only works with saws because he is a saw carpenter and that for other kinds of work you should see the plane or sander carpenter . To me sa…

> Anyone would think it to be ridiculous if a carpenter told you he only works with saws because he is a saw carpenter and that for other kinds of work you should see the plane or sander carpenter.

...and yet there are specialties within like "framer" and "finisher", among others. Then you have interior workers like specialized custom cabinet makers, flooring specialist, drywallers, painters, etc.

What I'm trying to say here is that even in "carpentry" for putting up a house, there are numerous specialties.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#515

Post by Philipp__ »

cr0sh wrote: post #489
Philipp__ wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't wrote a lot of QT, but Cocoa/DELFI felt totally different than writing Electron app GUI. Writing Electron app felt like sketching, at least to me. You place one line of code with tags and boom there's a button. Now QT takes place somewhere in between, and it still provides nice native multiplatform environment that could be appealing to web developers.

> Writing Electron app felt like sketching, at least to me. You place one line of code with tags and boom there's a button. Runtime issues aside (bloat, cpu, etc), why is this a bad thing? I like that I can write a single line of code and "bam!" get a button (or any number of things) to appear. Why would or should I want things to be more difficult for me to develop a piece of software? Sure, I could do things in som…

So do you think that the future of computing is blinking cursor in code text editor consuming 13% of CPU? Or maybe small gif using 30%?

You presented like the problem was in writing of the code, it's not, that's Electron's biggest strength. The problem is the bloat that it comes with in order to provide you with that experience. Like everything, it's the matter of tradeoff. For me, it's not worth it, nor I like writing HTML and CSS.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#516

Post by meredydd »

goatlover wrote: post #414
bobthedino wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layout management: I do wonder sometimes how much awareness the HTML/CSS/JS community has about how layout management is handled in things like Java's Swing or Apple's Auto Layout - or do people think that "desktop style" UI layout management is the "old way of doing things", and obviously HTML/CSS/JS is much more modern and therefore must be better? I don't think it is better, to be honest, and so I also wonder why…

Can't help thinking that Visual Basic had a better layout manager than CSS. I hate fixing CSS issues with a passion. I watch a designer whip up something in Illustrator and can't help thinking that CSS & HTML are a primitive way to do layouts. Smalltalk had a GUI based approach to design in the 70s on a 2 mb disk, and most web layout is generating html & css, then tweaking that stuff. It doesn't feel like web layout…

Interestingly, Visual Basic did it all with absolute (pixel-by-pixel) positioning. Some (not all, but some) of the issue is that we have moved forward in what we expect out of UIs. (The rest, of course, is that the Web front-end is a shitshow of epic proportions)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#517

Post by douche »

srssays wrote: post #305
matthewmacleod wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and that's fine. I don't think anyone is going to begrudge a small team the power of developing a 'desktop' application using cross-platform tools like that. It's great that the barrier to developing an application in that way is lowered. But that doesn't excuse the abuse of that platform. Spotify used to have a pretty convincing native Mac app, which was spiked in favour of their current abomination, and I've wa…

Electron is great for user experience. Compare to something like JetBrains' IDEs which are written in Java and are much less native feeling than Atom (and just as resource-hungry).

Comparing Atom and IntelliJ is like comparing a BB gun to a 155mm howitzer.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#518

Post by sametmax »

mpweiher wrote: post #478
coldtea wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computing for ever. We use C to avoid writing assembly. Use Java to avoid writing C. Use Python to avoid writing Java. Yeah, but until Electron and they like, we seldom shipped desktop apps in anything than C, C++, Delphi etc even after all those decades. Which are all as close to the metal as can be. And in fact C/C++ can be as fast, or even faster than hand-rolled assembly most of the time (with few exception), s…

Actually, I've been shipping desktop apps in Objective-C for roughly a quarter of a century. Gets me the high-level, Smalltalk-ish productivity when I want it (most of the time) and the low-level C efficiency when I need it (sometimes). Having my cake and eating it, that's me :-)

But can you make a website with the same knowledge ? Can you make it portable to other OS ? Can you reuse 20 years of knowledge, resources and libs ? Can you hire tomorrow 10 experts to help you on it ?

Quality of the tech is NOT the drive for success here. You are missing the point.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#519

Post by boskonyc »

smokeyj wrote: post #403

There's two kinds of developers. Dorks who care about programming, and programmers who care about creating deliverable value. What do consumers think about electron apps? That's all that matters. Consumers don't know what the heck electron is, only that their apps work seamlessly across platforms. The only people who complain about electron apps are dorks who have an axe to grind with web developers. I'd rather have…

I'd like to suggest an edit to two kinds of programmers: There are programmers that care about the quality, elegance, and beauty of their code, and there are programmers who just want to make the most people happy as fast as possible. Fine dining vs fast food.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#520

Post by eddieh »

smokeyj wrote: post #403

There's two kinds of developers. Dorks who care about programming, and programmers who care about creating deliverable value. What do consumers think about electron apps? That's all that matters. Consumers don't know what the heck electron is, only that their apps work seamlessly across platforms. The only people who complain about electron apps are dorks who have an axe to grind with web developers. I'd rather have…

Just checked the all recent the crash reports saved on my Mac. Slack has crashed more than anything!

This is especially surprising because I'm currently writing a custom crash reporter and part of that was experimenting with the builtin crash reporter by crashing a test app.

Just to be clear Slack is ahead of everything, even my artificially induced crashes..

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