Flash player was A pretty minimal download and was not a resource hog. Shitty punch the monkey ads hacked together by people who couldn't program were the CPU killers
Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
611–620 of 1001 posts
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet If developers weren't so scared of Swift and C#, this wouldn't be a problem. > (writing Desktop apps) is massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies. I find the opposite to be almost universally true. Writing a lightweight nati…
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…
The real irony is that OP's bio says
> JavaScript Hacker at Slack
meaning he works for a company that heavily leveraged an existing protocol, IRC, for which there are already a metric fuckton of native clients and libraries for every platform under the sun.
Implementing their shitty web client was undoubtedly far more work than supporting a handful of native clients.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you been trained as an engineer, in a country where "engineer" is a very specific thing and is held to higher expectations, including the possibility of having your title taken away by your peers if you do not respect your duty to, first and foremost, your users and/or society, like every country that takes the title of engineer seriously? No country trains software engineers in the way you describe.
All of Europe, also parts of Canada. No place in the US does, indeed.
I've never heard of some governing body in France or England taking away the title of "software engineer" for someone who wrote faulty code. What are these governing bodies?
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems... Really??? Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have. Don't try running on battery saving mode, seriously. I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions. ---- Fun Anecdote: I had to trial an ent…
Different people have vastly different use cases. I haven't experienced a performance issue with desktop Slack or any other (non-game) application for many years. Sure, if I look at how much RAM Slack is using I'd probably conclude that it's more than it needs to be, but I haven't had an issue with RAM usage for, gee, probably ten years. As for battery, again, my laptop battery has been little more than a UPS for at…
It's mostly CPU performances I experience. Rendering any video, gif, website takes sizeable CPU power (for a cheap CPU in power saving mode).
Never had issue with RAM. I can remember a few friends who bought netbooks with 2GB memory some years ago, they quickly realized that they simply cannot run their development environment in that. (I'm talking swap death where a click that should take 1 second to act takes 1 entire minute).
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#615> 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…
I was about to call bullshit on the blog author, but I guess we are getting to that point. I've been hoping for a React or Vue-native version for desktop so that the Chromium in Electron could be avoided.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're joking, right? Electron apps are fully inconsistent with any environment they live in. Want right-click? Sorry. Platform-standard control elements or animations? Nope. Reminds me of some of the worst excesses[1] of AAA Windows software - now available on Mac. [1] http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lFgnREt7Q_c/U2mqWkYYDiI/AAAAAAAAAJ... Edit: I think it's ironic that Macs were criticized for years for having single-butto…
Right click on electron?? What're you talking about?
I'll admit my experience with electron apps is limited to Slack - where right clicking. Gives you "Copy Link" and "Go To Link". Having said that, do you have an example of an electron app that's not a design misfit within MacOS and Windows?
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is that true from a user's perspective? It is for this user. > What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Far better resource management, one would hope, for starters. As the article pointed out, when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MB…
> I personally don't care if Electron goes away or what, but to the extent that I'm forced to run Slack by my cow-orkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass. For what it's worth, since you seem to like IRC clients so much better, Slack has a built-in IRC bridge: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t... . It works just fine, in my experience.
From experience, using the bridge means pinging the admin on slack about it, and convincing them that it's even worth doing, and then being stuck in "The IRC Room", instead of the others rooms in which people are actually communicating.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#618Btw, I can tell you exactly what the "Preventing Sleep" is all about. I'm 100% positive there's a bug in Chrome's WebRTC stack that causes that to happen.
Fire up Chrome, doesn't happen. Go on a Hangout, yip "Preventing Sleep".
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real trick is whether or not users care about: A) This works on all of the platforms that we use vs B) Performance could be better on my computer It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...which is almost entirely because SSD's make them so much less noticeable if you start dipping into swap unless you're really working out your machine. For most us…
> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems... Really??? Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have. Don't try running on battery saving mode, seriously. I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions. ---- Fun Anecdote: I had to trial an ent…
> I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded,
5+ years ago is that LOOOOOONG time that OP was talking about. It's also unfair to compare technical capabilities of old hardware for many reasons. I think the point was that, new hardware, _while its new_, is becoming more and more capable. Any new laptop today, even budget ones, can handle YouTube videos in HD. The problem is that HD today won't be the same HD that exists in 5 years (i.e., 4k), and it's sensible that a budget laptop today will struggle with the 8k technology that comes out 5 years from now. This is an old problem (pun intended) and should not be surprising.
> Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have.
Selection bias. Programmers who compile code, run VMs or containers, and process tons of data, are not the average consumer laptop use case and have much stricter requirements. Many people are sitting in Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, or Google Docs for most of their day-- and likely inside of Chrome.
Where are the "Chrome is Flash for the desktop" posts?
The idea that Electron is any different of a user experience for the vast majority of users seems skewed to developer usage, to me.
Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
But these apps aren't "proof-of-concept" apps - they are fully functioning, working cross-platform applications. So are you saying that these companies which have implemented these apps should instead say "You know what, we have this app developed, and working on the major platforms - but let's instead devote three new teams, one each for Windows, Mac, and Linux - to re-implement this app natively! I'm sure upper man…
> It's not the developers. Developers would love to make native apps, for all the platforms. I don't think that's true in the case of Slack. They only have JS "hacker" webdevs, and those are notoriously resistant to any change to their comfort zone. C++? WPF? Swift? Cocoa? Scary stuff.
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