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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)

#721

Post by joeblau »

wishinghand wrote: post #269
joeblau wrote: post #266

I've slowly started to remove Electron apps from my workflow. I used to use Atom, but I've switched to an paid for Sublime. The last two apps I have which use electron are Hyper and Slack. Hyper could go, but I really like the interface and Slack probably isn't going anywhere. Real-time update: I just checked Activity Monitor and Hyper is leading average energy impact followed by Xcode. Looks like I might be switchin…

What is the draw of Hyper over iTerm2?

Honestly, and I know this is stupid, it just looks better and can be customized a bit more. Since I really should be more focused on performance, I'm going to switch to either iTerm or Terminal.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#722

Post by grinich »

Mithaldu wrote: post #635
grinich wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You can actually join the chat via IRC/XMPP. No chicken sacrifice required! :P https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...

I haven't tried Opera M2-- I'll check it out. Might be a fun hackathon project to train a Bayesian filter on every folder and auto-suggest routing at least.

There was a big IBM Research study a few years ago that showed it's dramatically more efficient to search email versus categorizing messages into folders. Here's a link to the full paper: http://people.ucsc.edu/~swhittak/papers/chi2011_refinding_em...

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#723

Post by psyc »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #97
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…

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 reminds me of what's happened with Unity (the game engine). There's a completely false perception that Unity is eating other engines' lunch. It isn't. All that happening is that game development has been democratized on an absolutely massive scale. So more games are being made. Most of them are bad. Most of the best games are made with either Unreal, or much more commonly, proprietary C++/asm engines.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#724

Post by jwilk »

collyw wrote: post #320
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because I'm curious, why would you not use your native language for the content on your page?

Because English is the most spoken language in the world perhaps? Its even more noticeable in tech, because a lot of docs only seem to be in English.

I'm pretty sure the most spoken language is Chinese.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#725

Post by smokeyj »

AlexandrB wrote: post #616
smokeyj wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I use Atom on a daily basis. Dead simple plugins and themes. Check out the git-time-machine-view plugin.

Of course it's not perfect. But as someone who's used it for the past year I can attest it's been a joy to use.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#726

Post by abiox »

sametmax wrote: post #523
edko wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java also has JavaFX, which comes with an embedded Webkit browser. I can create my UI with React, or any other HTML/CSS/JS library, and make it interact with code written in Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Kotlin, Ceylon, Frege, etc. very easily. I think this provides all the benefits of Electron, but is even more flexible and powerful.

Yet, this is not as popular as electron. Ask yourself why.

i'd guess that there are a variety of things to consider. do you actually have anything to say?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#727

Post by tmcb »

smokeyj wrote: post #580
boskonyc wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a difference between writing maintainable code and premature optimization. Experience is knowing the difference between you can and you should .

It is easy to talk about premature optimization in a world like ours; the hardware industry spits products twice as fast and generous in regards to memory every three years or so, to keep up with software designed by programmers who think likewise. You just replace your two-year old laptop with 4GB of RAM---which became unusable all of a sudden because now it keeps hitting virtual memory, which is I/O expensive---for one with 8GB of RAM.

If you consider hardware is a commodity and the cost of opportunity for replacing hardware instead of optimizing software is worth it, then formulate it better.

One may object by saying that the burden on hardware resources is higher because we consume more data, which is partially right. Although I don't intend to give a thorough objection here, please consider those two points:

- The payload fraction is larger in multimedia applications, for sure, but I can't see a reason why the "propellant mass fraction" equivalent in software should be bigger than it was, for example, 10 years ago. If we consider text-only data as an example, we notice that the propellant mass fraction increased as well.

- Higher level languages undeniably consume more resources by orders of magnitude; hardware frequencies must keep up by orders of magnitude as well.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#728

Post by tyler_mann »

The electron bundle zipped without any extra app code is only 40MB. This is barely any bigger than the smallest of most iOS that get auto-downloaded to your phone every day. I haven't ever noticed any significant performance hits and I use Slack/Spotify every day. The problem you are speaking to is the same one that comes with any framework that is distributed. Any app using Swift 1.0 had to ship the Swift runtime with the app bundle until they eventually baked it into the OS and allowed sharing framework versions. The same problem happens with JVM if you've ever used a java app on Mac that doesn't use the built-in Java runtime. Its not really a concern to me, as I think this size is negligible and the runtime for Chrome is already the model of isolation so this just extends that slightly further. However I'm sure the Electron folks would be happy if you wanted to contribute to further the performance/usage requirements of the platform.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#729

Post by bitmapbrother »

AlexandrB wrote: post #499
bitmapbrother wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. Being able to write an application and have it work on multiple platforms without any major UI inconsistencies or UX idiosyncrasies is a major benefit.

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…

Considering you just admitted to only ever using Slack I would think you would be the one joking, right?
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