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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)

#751

Post by user5994461 »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #695
user5994461 wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use an old school network drive to share documents in an enterprise, irrelevant of their nature. Easy and simple.

I am referring to Google's realtime collaboration features. Given a URL, you can enter the document and see it being modified in real time, as well as edit, annotate and comment in real time. It's 2017, this is how we work now. My colleagues (literally) across the world are not going to connect to some shared NFS drive or whatever via VPN to store documents.

What if the shared drive is automatically mounted on your computer when you log on?

One drive for your personal documents only for you. One drive for your team only visible and editable by people in your team. One drive company wide with common stuff.

You can send a link to your colleagues and it just works! That doesn't support multiple editing though. That's how things were done historically.

Google doc is good to send a documents to a bunch of emails and see/edit the documents. It's terrible to write longer documents with advanced formatting, pictures and schemas.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#752

Post by overgard »

Touche wrote: post #607
coldtea wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". A higher barrier to entry has that effect. Low quality crap doesn't get in as easily. > Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in…

Making desktop apps might be a nice lifestyle business for niche segments, but there aren't many (any?) big businesses built on desktop apps any more. Microsoft and Adobe are doing well on the desktop, churning out new versions of apps they've been building for nearly 30 years, but I can't think of any company built in the last 10 years (at least) that came up that way. In the meantime, here's one of those "web-based…

If you can't think of any companies that have built significant desktop apps recently, you're just not looking. I don't even get how this is an argument. "Well I haven't personally installed a native app recently, so obviously they're unimportant."

You know what's never going to go out of fashion? Performance. Especially since CPU speeds have stalled in the last decade. you will never get good performance if your design is: "embed an entire browser, and then use a small piece of it"

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#753

Post by ornitorrincos »

sametmax wrote: post #423
cableshaft wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but Python still doesn't seem to have a great cross-platform desktop GUI, as far as I can find. I'd prefer to code entirely in Python if I could, but I haven't liked a single GUI library I've tried for Python. Although to be fair I haven't really tried PyQT out still, but I don't like the idea of having to buy a commercial license for it.

PyQT is alright. Kivy as well. Or anything in any other language. But none of them are close enough to the benefit of being able to use the tone of experience from the Web UI into the desktop. Eventually all GUI app toolkit ends up with a custom MVC framework, a client/server architecture, some kind of db for persistence, their own implementation of asynchronous event and communication models and a declarative layer…

I do strongly disagree with the web having the only strong standard, specially since it switched to a living standard

I admit that for someone from the web electron is a godsend, but to be honest, responsiveness of the applications leave something to be desired

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#754

Post by alkonaut »

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…

Why would native apps be so expensive? Are they 10x slower to write? Isn't the tooling etc for making a WPF app at least as good as it is for electron? Obviously if you have a web app or node backend already you might have code you can re use but that's not the case generally. Just being able to not use Js should be a pretty big win (although .ts is also available for electron I suppose). Not to mention that libraries etc are specifically created for desktop and not web (e.g the xaml layout model vs the DOM). Or are they expensive because traditional desktop devs are hard to find and/or cost more?

I think it's sad that both Apple and Microsoft dropped the ball on desktop because they are only focusing on funneling users to their stores. If the Microsoft of 2017 (with open source .NET and Linux as a focus) had been around a few years ago when WPF was invented, they could have made a decent cross platform toolkit now that didn't come from html/CSS/js

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#755

Post by mlsarecmg »

true_religion wrote: post #351
mlsarecmg wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is scared of C# and Swift, XAML and so on, but these technologies aren't even close to what you have available on the web. React and Redux make apps possible that you wouldn't get with older technologies, not even with 10 times the effort and code. The animation possibilities, transitions, the flexibility overall, the eco system, debugging capabilities, hot module reload - if you have worked with it, you will…

What is VSCode doing that's impossible to do in a native application? I'm curious, since I use PyCharm and I wonder what I could be missing out on.

See the wider picture, how flexible they are and how fast they grow. Their freedom in making things possible that would be very hard to realize.

The shell that i'm using for instance, Hyperterm, it does things no other shell can do, and they had more than a decade to evolve. JS doesn't have a problem displaying json as json, display webpages on link clicks, moving up git logs with my trackpad, adding tabs with a plugin that contains a few lines of code and a little css, ... it just comes easy to JS.

The same flexibility you see in Atom, VSC and the others.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#756

Post by ornitorrincos »

omginternets wrote: post #711
vbezhenar wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C is generally faster, than hand-written assembly, so it doesn't make sense to write software in assembler. For macOS desktop applications are written with Objective C, which is C with fast message-passing, and doesn't trade much to speed. Swift is modern alternative, but it doesn't trade anything for speed either. For Linux applications are traditionally written with C and Gtk or with C++ and Qt. Those options are b…

>C is generally faster, than hand-written assembly, so it doesn't make sense to write software in assembler. That's true now . It wasn't true then . The point still stands.

and not even true now for certain workloads, each tool for its job

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#757

Post by cloverich »

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 think OP meant that the app is consistent across platforms -- e.g. Slack on Windows looks and works like Slack on MacOS.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#758

Post by abiox »

boskonyc wrote: post #519
smokeyj wrote: post #403

There's two kinds of developers. Dorks who care about programming, and programmers who care about creating deliverable value. What do consumers think about electron apps? That's all that matters. Consumers don't know what the heck electron is, only that their apps work seamlessly across platforms. The only people who complain about electron apps are dorks who have an axe to grind with web developers. I'd rather have…

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.

> programmers that care about the quality, elegance, and beauty of their code

this seems less like fine dining, and more like a fancy kitchen. this is much more about the chef (though there are possibly secondary effects for diners).

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#759

Post by smokeyj »

tmcb wrote: post #727
smokeyj wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The desktop is a dying platform, and if you're on it you can probably afford the overhead. From a global perspective if you're after accessability you'd be targeting the web and android. Both of which lend themselves nicely to react/react-native. And if you already have this architecture you can package it for desktop basically for free and integrate with the needed platform features that way, along with an upgrade strategy if you use react-native for OSX/Win.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#760

Post by quantum_state »

It seems to me that there is not much to worried about ... it is an ecosystem ... things would naturally evolve ... if electron happens to consume too much power n conserving power is an important concern ... the developers will need to do the right thing .. otherwise the app developed will not get used by that many ppl ...
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