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Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

proton-native.js.org

61–70 of 295 posts

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#61
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey. I'm the author. It's hard to find a simple example that everyone understands but can show capabilities. If you're used to Qt then you're going to like Qt better, but I mainly developed this for people who want to use React. You are obviously free to use whatever you want. But if you have any suggestions let me know!

Why didn’t you address the claim that you were just straight up lying?

Because I forgot. I updated the page. My bad.

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#62
post #53
post #49

Sort of tangential, but does anyone know of a good React Native app? Everything I've tried would clearly have been a better product if they'd just done native development. Like, you're sacrificing product quality for development ease.

You might recognize a few on this list: http://facebook.github.io/react-native/showcase.html

None of those are apps I particularly enjoy using or would want to use.

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#63

I like react on the web, but sometimes I find it cumbersome all that sending props down and passing functions to update global state. When I'm almost done with an app and then I decide that it will be nicer to open a modal window to ask the user 2 or 3 parameters is when I miss the most the desktop paradigm of just call a method that opens a small window and returns an object with the collected data

I have a ModalContainer that passes down this.context.openModal.

https://reactjs.org/docs/context.html

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#64

> You can create a GUI using something like Qt, but the code to make it is messy and unorganized. Having made a very large GUI myself, it gets very cumbersome to manage all of that. Haven't we moved past writing UIs in code about twenty years ago? I see your code samples, and all they look like is an improved version of the code UI creation we had in OWL, MFC, and other UI frameworks on other platforms. Starting abou…

You always need the capability to generate UI in code, because static forms sometimes don't suffice. For example the layout and contents of your form depend on the data that is sent to it, like render a choice as checkbox if it is binary, use dropdown otherwise. I used delphi, etc., MFC was really bad forcing too much inheritance.

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#65
Using Electron, you are rendering each window in Chrome, with some added OS hooks. With Proton, you are using JavaScriptCore with hooks to the native MacOS UIs and APIs.

Seems to me that this should use far fewer resources (especially memory) and make it easier to make an App look more 'MacOS'y. Very eager to give it a go!

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#66
I don't totally understand why this exists to be honest. React Native for desktop is... React Native. It isn't mobile-specific in any way. In fact, it is already possible to make Windows (UWP) and macOS apps with it.

If this project was about formalising proper stable support for Windows and macOS within React Native, that would totally make sense. But it seems more like it's trying to be an alternative, under a different name, different branding, etc.

Surely it's better to remain as one widely compatible project?

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#67

> You can create a GUI using something like Qt, but the code to make it is messy and unorganized. Having made a very large GUI myself, it gets very cumbersome to manage all of that. Haven't we moved past writing UIs in code about twenty years ago? I see your code samples, and all they look like is an improved version of the code UI creation we had in OWL, MFC, and other UI frameworks on other platforms. Starting abou…

NIBs in macOS/iOS are horrible for development and code review. Using a UI to build UI is slow and clunky. There is no "moving past" it. That's a bad way to develop stuff. We don't do it with HTML, do we? No.

Exactly. I feel like the design experience of HTML/CSS is the best of both worlds. You're designing in code, but it's not imperative code, which is what you have to do in iOS if you want to escape the NIB. Using declarative code to define your interface just...makes sense.

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#68

I don't totally understand why this exists to be honest. React Native for desktop is... React Native. It isn't mobile-specific in any way. In fact, it is already possible to make Windows (UWP) and macOS apps with it. If this project was about formalising proper stable support for Windows and macOS within React Native, that would totally make sense. But it seems more like it's trying to be an alternative, under a diff…

> React Native for desktop is... React Native. It isn't mobile-specific in any way. In fact, it is already possible to make Windows (UWP) and macOS apps with it.

And what if you want to make a non-UWP app for accessibility or other reasons? Just your standard, straight forward Win32 GUI. Bringing the power of React to that space will still appeal to many.

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#69
Without having used Proton Native myself, comparing your product to React Native is not something you would want to do, honestly. React Native has insanely huge growing pains, still going, even though it's been out since 2015. The last time I checked there was still no reasonable, scalable way to do complex navigation on the platform. Most third-party components are unusable six months in due to API changes. The list goes on. On the tin, React Native, and in the same way, Proton Native, look very promising, but for anything that's more complex than a demo application, my personal recommendation is to steer far away. You're free to disagree, of course, but having extensively tried to use the "write once run everywhere", my personal experience is that it always ends up more along the lines of "write once, then patch all the bugs separately on all the platforms".

Re: Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

#70

> You can create a GUI using something like Qt, but the code to make it is messy and unorganized. Having made a very large GUI myself, it gets very cumbersome to manage all of that. Haven't we moved past writing UIs in code about twenty years ago? I see your code samples, and all they look like is an improved version of the code UI creation we had in OWL, MFC, and other UI frameworks on other platforms. Starting abou…

NIBs in macOS/iOS are horrible for development and code review. Using a UI to build UI is slow and clunky. There is no "moving past" it. That's a bad way to develop stuff. We don't do it with HTML, do we? No.

Absolutely, most big mobile development teams I know do not use storyboards or NIBs because they are not easily human reviewable. (A small change will rearrange sections for seemlying no reason.)
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