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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)

#631

Post by Touche »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #530
Touche wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Why use several host platforms if the platform makes no difference to you? I don't, I use The Web for 90% of all things I use on a computer. A Chromebook is one of the computers I use the most when not working for precisely this reason. > Why else do you think people make a big point of an app being native Cocoa? It is because they know it sells better, because they know customers want the native well integrated…

I think you're mistaken, the fact that so many company are switching to Electron is evidence that it doesn't sell better. Hold on a bit with that assertion. First: which apps built on Electron are being sold, period? All the ones I'm aware of are open source, like Atom, or front ends to services, like Slack. Second: which companies are switching to Electron for development? Again, all the Electron apps I'm familiar w…

Well, Slack is an example of an Electron app that is sold.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#632

Post by nol13 »

maxsilver wrote: post #212
yesimahuman wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the user experience is already great, so what's the gain? Electron and the web clearly make a first class app platform on desktop. EDIT: thanks for the downvotes. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how electron is keeping Slack and Spotify from building a massive business and how their desktop users find the experience so bad they don't use the tools obsessively. Clearly there are things to improve w/ Electron (en…

As a paying customer, both Spotify and Slack are relativity shitty experiences. I pay for both despite their poor quality software and bad UI/UX, not because of it.

Anecdotally, I had to cancel spotify due to shitty experience. One of their app updates on my phone left it completely draining my battery in a few hours even when not using the app, with no way to keep it from running in the background other than to uninstall. (ok or possibly rooting my phone to install more recent android with better background process control)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#633

Post by discreditable »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #450
discreditable wrote: post #125

Would it make more sense to distribute electron as a dependency and allow apps to use it? That way, instead of 10 apps requiring 10 different electrons we have 10 apps that can use a pre-installed electron.

How does an app bundling Electron in that way differ from an app using a native embedded browser widget (other than that it can run in Chrome vs. Edge/Safari/etc.)?

> using a native embedded browser widget (other than that it can run in Chrome vs. Edge/Safari/etc.)?

I didn't know that was possible, do people do that?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#634

Post by gavanwoolery »

All of this extra memory and CPU power has made us lazy.

Simple applications often lag, because they are written on top of heaps of crap. Yet you look at a 4k demo that does more impressive stuff with a fraction of the resources.

When we step really far back, an application should not require that much code. Nor should the process of abstracting an application on top of a native system. These things only get muddled when you depend on specific functionality of the system that is difficult to abstract (i.e. native GUI component and layout), which you can easily simulate with your own GUI renderer, potentially in a more optimal way.

Anyhow, I'll sit here waiting patiently until someone figures out how to write once, run everywhere in a relatively bloat-free manner. :)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#635

Post by Mithaldu »

grinich wrote: post #532
Mithaldu wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm holding off my downvote to see if i can get a straight answer out of you. Nylas Mail bills itself as the best email app. Them's strong words, but maybe you're worth the claim? Let's see! I see from screenshots that Nylas has folders and labels. Can i use either of these in the following fashion? - i can have a tree structure of them - an email can be in two separate folders/labels at the same time - folders/label…

Some quick answers • If by "tree structure" you mean a folder hierarchy, yep that's supported. I think we have a current bug with dragging nested subfolders but we're working on a fix. (Surprisingly >99% of users have a flat hierarchy.) • A thread can certainly be in two separate folders (e.g. Inbox and Sent) but an individual message can't be in two folders at once. In that situation there are two copies on the actu…

That's worth upvotes for the effort alone, thanks. :)

> Surprisingly >99% of users have a flat hierarchy

You tend to end up with it only after really long-term usage. All the folders with sub-folders i have got them after they got too big to be just one, e.g. "Perl coding stuff" has several subs, "Shopping", "Clients", "Computer Game Emails", etc. Some clients have additional subs. All started out as a singular one though.

> threads, not singular mails

Ok, fair enough.

> labels auto-learning by drag&drop ... AFAIK there is no cross-platform mail client that does this today beyond things like manual Gmail filters

Opera M2 does it extremely well since ~2000. Google Inbox does it ... eh. Mobile and PC, none, right. The filtering is honestly super easy to implement. It's a bayesian filter. In older email clients those were used to filter out spam. Opera M2 simply gives each folder one (user-configurable) and runs all the filters on each mail that comes in.

And to be fully honest here, i still use Opera 12 as my main browser, along with its mail client and don't see myself jumping ship ... anytime really since for me the combination of mail client and browser is key. However to respect an email client i expect it to be a feature match to Opera M2 at least.

Not interested in Slack. If you had an IRC channel tough i wouldn't need to sacrifice a chicken and a CPU core. :)

> UI

Ok, that looks fine. I personally prefer to have the email below the mail list, but that's not a huge thing. Maybe an option to consider. Screenshot mode is cute. :)

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#636

Post by positivecomment »

pikzen wrote: post #232
positivecomment wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write Electron apps and call myself an engineer, because I am an engineer. Could you please explain why am I being hilarious?

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? If yes, what in earth makes you think writing Electron apps is a good ide…

> 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?

I have been trained as a Software Engineer in Istanbul. I am very sorry that my country doesn't fulfill your expectations.

> If yes, what in earth makes you think writing Electron apps is a good idea?

Engineering is about making trade-offs. There's enough discussion here about what those are for writing Electron apps.

> If no, back to my point.

What, "no"? What was your point? ...that I'm not an engineer? As I said, I am one.

> yes, I am an utter cunt, but being called a typical hackernews one hurts, considering how I can't stand most HNers

I don't think you are a cunt. I think you are uninformed and have concrete opinions based on limited or self-fulfilling-prophecy-boosting experience.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#637

Post by bengotow »

mydigitalself wrote: post #618

Btw, 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".

But... isn't this correct? I wouldn't want my machine falling asleep while on a conference call, so preventing sleep is a good thing?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#638

Post by Mithaldu »

ceedan wrote: post #598
Mithaldu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the question is: Does your app run always like a daemon or just when you actually need it? It can be fine to prototype in Electron, or to make tools in it. But if you're making a chat program or anything similarly long-lived, it's the worst decision you can make for your user.

"it's the worst decision you can make for your user" - Is it? Because there are a lot of Slack users who don't care at all about your tradeoffs. Most of them don't even notice. We're just the unfortunate ones who do notice.

Whether they notice or not is orthogonal to whether it's a bad decision for them or not though.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#639

Post by pseudalopex »

roryisok wrote: post #289
matthewmacleod wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense . Desktop apps have been frequently released since forever. The underlying issue here is that Electron reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development . That is, it's cheaper to build a single cross-platform application in Electron than it is to build two or three native applications, and you can re-use your existing web experience. I can completely understand why companies might choose th…

This issue is so furiously divisive, and I feel like it brings out the worst in HN. I'm from a web dev background. Some of the comments here make me feel like I should be ashamed of that fact. I can see both sides of this argument (every time it comes up) As a consumer of apps, I want the leanest, most minimalist, fastest thing going. I want native apps on my devices (If you think slack is a hog on the desktop you sh…

Your non-technical users are capable of noticing that a certain application makes their computer slow or drains their battery or doesn't support a certain feature of their platform. It may take them longer to notice, and they won't know why, but that won't stop them from switching if a better alternative comes along.

Delivering high-quality web apps generally requires knowing JavaScript and CSS. Delivering high-quality desktop apps generally requires knowing the tools of that ecosystem. Sometimes we compromise to get things out the door, but we should be honest with ourselves when we do.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#640

Post by Klathmon »

RedCrowbar wrote: post #628
newhere420 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, those figures were after adding up all the processes. What I have noticed in switching between platforms is that applications tend to report a far lower memory usage in Windows than on Linux or OS X. Might just be an accounting difference. Forked process applications in particular are very difficult to account, because even their private/RSS may be COW from another process.

My figures exclude shared memory and are calculated as VmRss - Shared from /proc/ /statm. If you are using Windows 10, your missing Atom processes will be under Background Processes in Task Manager. For the sake of the argument, I just did a fresh install of Atom and this is what I see on the first run: https://i.imgur.com/0ZRSumF.png . ~220MiB (no files open, zero extensions).

That's really interesting! I have an up-to-date atom install that i've been adding plugins to for about a year now (up to like 50 or so), and has been running for at least 12 hours (windows 10), and currently has 7 ~500 line files open.

Adding up all the processes' (7 of them) private memory gets me 194mb.

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