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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)

#541

Post by LeoNatan25 »

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…

And you really envision the future as webtech? That's sad commentary in and of itself, isn't it? You lament old ways of work in one sentence and glorify the most terrible ecosystem and methodology in the next.

Simplifying in itself is not bad. Improving API with newer and better is not bad. Adding language features to advance productivity is not bad (thinking of C# iterations vs Java). Basing the future on a terrible language, ecosystem, practices and "developer" mindset is very bad.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#542

Post by bobwaycott »

rpastuszak wrote: post #264
bobwaycott wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything in the world of web-stack development has turned externalizing costs onto users as a core first principle.

How about PWA, Service Workers, WebAssembly? Thousands of developers are working hard on improving the UX, reduce battery usage, wasted CPU cycles, network traffic, latency.

All of this because they're externalizing costs onto users through SPAs and other go-to practices that force all the work onto users' devices.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#543

Post by castone »

automathematics wrote: post #454

So many divisive opinions here, but in case anyone reads this far down, here's my 2 cents: - Yes, desktop apps existed before Electron. But the top comment is right. How many desktop apps. NOT utilities but full featured apps (like Spotify and Atom) that you loved either got swallowed up by other companies (Mailbox) or discontinued due to "lack of use" (read: lack of profitability). I'm sure if you dig deep you can r…

Why not use Unity instead?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#544

Post by gkya »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #322
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…

By "nobody", he means JavaScript "hackers" (his term) and webdevs. How joyful that those types of "devs" are now excited and "care" about desktop and mobile development.

Limiting oneself to JavaScript is quite limiting. Just like a polyglot person is has access to way more information, cultures and fun than a monolingual one; a polyglot programmer too has access to more tools, paradigms and fun. Also, hammering everything as if all the stuff was nails is not hacking at all.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#545

Post by zwetan »

nsebban wrote: post #11
andreicon wrote: post #2

Flash used to work on the desktop as well, they had this little "projector applications" iirc

You could "compile" your animation as an executable file, as well as an SWF file.

you still can, it is called a "projector", you basically merge the Flash Standalone player exe with a SWF into one executable.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#546

Post by grinich »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #473
grinich wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another one for your list: Nylas Mail. We straight up would have not shipped it without Electron and the CPU it uses to sync is on-par with apps like Apple Mail & Thunderbird.

Nylas Mail > Nylas Mail - The best free email app | Nylas - The best free email app What exactly makes it "best"? It looks to offer nothing more than other "best" mail apps.

Hard to answer your question without hijacking the thread, but here goes:

• It's got pretty much all the power features out there like Snoozing, Open Tracking, Send Later, Reminders, Enriched Contacts (i.e. Rapportive), Unified Inbox, Swipe Actions, Templates, etc.

• It's open source and super easy to extend with JavaScript plugins. Developer have made dozens of themes and some cool plugins including PGP, Unsubscribe, Translation, Todoist, Trello, Markdown, etc.

• It's cross-platform for Mac, Windows & Linux with custom UI styles for each.

• It works with all mail providers including Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Outlook and even vanilla IMAP and on-prem Exchange servers.

• It syncs your data directly (not via a cloud service) for speed and security.

• It works offline, so you can use it on a plane or when you don't have WiFi.

• It's open source GPL available on GitHub with >20k stars: https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail

• It's free.

It's also still improving and has over 800 GitHub issues and we would love help from anyone who wants to make email better! :)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#547

Post by skratlo »

migueloller wrote: post #16

> If you want to use JS and react to make a native app, try react native instead. Given the discussion of the recent ReactXP thread, I'm guessing most people don't realize you can do this today . React Native supports macOS [1] and UWP [2]. Edit: There's even some early work on Ubuntu support [3]. [1] https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows [3] https://github.c…

Ubuntu support? Are you kidding me? Is Ubuntu an OS? Is it an UI tookit? So what in fact is React Native Ubuntu? Probably a React Native backend that displays the UI on Shuttleworth's ego.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#548

Post by kyberias »

d--b wrote: post #196

Electron is just another proof that ease of programming matters. Node.js too was a terrible idea. Who in their right mind would write server-side javascript? It turns out: pretty much anyone who didn't want to have to screw around for hours before being able to respond to a simple http request. Similarly, it is way harder to write a desktop app than a browser app. DOM / CSS manipulation, however bad they are, are yea…

> DOM / CSS manipulation, however bad they are, are years ahead compared to what you can easily do with WPF and friends.

This doesn't make any sense. It's much easier to create UI with XAML (WPF) because it's designed for that purpose alone. HTML / CSS really isn't.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#549

Post by cbhl »

I think JavaScript is the new PHP -- it's accessible enough that people are going to be coding in it for the foreseeable future.

Chrome eats a lot of RAM, and frankly, most of these apps don't need all of Chrome. But any solution that requires moving away from JavaScript (e.g. C++/Qt apps) is too expensive in terms of retraining developers. (Facebook found it was cheaper to create Hack and HHVM than to train its engineers to stop writing PHP-like code.)

Maybe the answer here is a "React Native" library that results in native Windows/Linux/OS X desktop apps. But, with larger corps focusing on "mobile first" and "responsive design" memes, I don't imagine either Facebook or Google being the first to build such a thing.

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