Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electron 3.0.0

electronjs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 141 posts

Re: Electron 3.0.0

#81

Post by eschaton »

Spivak wrote: post #76
scarface74 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not writing the native code that's the problem, it's designing the same GUI experience across platforms that's nearly impossible to do. I don’t want the same “GUI experience” across platforms, I want a GUI experience that is consistent with the platform I am running. When I was a heavy Mac user, I hated iTunes on Windows because it felt like being on a Mac instead of Windows.

This is one of those things that very much matters to hacker types but very little to everyone else. The most important thing about cross platform development is having the exact same application feature for feature pixel for pixel if you can. Someone who knows how to use Spotify on any one platform should be able to navigate any other with 0 cognitive load. People learn applications, they don't learn systems -- apps…

Absolutely not the case.

Re: Electron 3.0.0

#82

Post by eschaton »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #69
NathanCH wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With so many platforms that's unrealistically expensive. It's not just Windows and OS X anymore.

Is having 1-3 Mac guys and 1-3 Windows guys (which is realistically all the vast majority of apps would need) really that much more expensive? To me it seems the real attraction is being able to hire from a giant pool of cheap, generic, interchangeable, fully replaceable developers.

Money people sometimes think so because they’d rather keep that money for themselves, users be damned.

Re: Electron 3.0.0

#83

Post by Spivak »

eschaton wrote: post #81
Spivak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those things that very much matters to hacker types but very little to everyone else. The most important thing about cross platform development is having the exact same application feature for feature pixel for pixel if you can. Someone who knows how to use Spotify on any one platform should be able to navigate any other with 0 cognitive load. People learn applications, they don't learn systems -- apps…

Absolutely not the case.

Examples of apps which go the extra effort to use each platforms toolkit and look and behave natively?

Re: Electron 3.0.0

#84

Post by eschaton »

Spivak wrote: post #77
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> provide a better experience for users and their machines Ah, but you see, the modern developer does not care about the user experience. "Developer time is worth more than user time", "move fast and break things", etc. Users are the cattle we feed ads to and farm for salable data.

The modern developer very much cares about user experience which is why the gold standard right now is pixel perfect feature perfect cross platform apps for web mobile and desktop.

Except that’s not the gold standard.

Where are you getting the idea that it is?

Re: Electron 3.0.0

#85

Post by flukus »

api wrote: post #58
Razengan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is writing native apps honestly still so hard these days? I can appreciate the concerns about maintaining multiple codebases and dealing with different delivery mechanisms and their rules, but modern iOS/macOS and Windows APIs (at least; I cannot speak for Android and Linux) seem just as easy, let you work in arguably better languages, evolve at a faster rate, and provide a better experience for users and their machi…

Yes. At least N times the work for N platforms. Fewer developers, harder to recruit. Cross-platform options like Qt are not modern/pretty enough and sometimes aren't that much thinner than Electron (depending on how well written the app is). Java/Swing/SWT is also quite bloated and looks terrible. Development is much slower in languages like C++. Other languages are not cross-platform or have immature/buggy cross pla…

> At least N times the work for N platforms.

Only if 100% of the code is the GUI.

Re: Electron 3.0.0

#86

Post by ForHackernews »

Spivak wrote: post #80
CyberDildonics wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

qTorrent, VLC, CMAKE, Obs, AbiWord and Touch Designer. That's off the top of my head. To say a company that has 200 MILLION in revenue can't re-write their client in Qt is indefensible nonsense.

You're probably right about cant, but why would they want to? A native version of their app would either embed a web browser or end up half-implementing one poorly. Why not just start with one?

Any Qt app can use QtWebView. There's a difference between putting a web browser inside your app and putting your app inside a web browser.

Re: Electron 3.0.0

#87

Post by kitsunesoba »

mr_toad wrote: post #78
kitsunesoba wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is having 1-3 Mac guys and 1-3 Windows guys (which is realistically all the vast majority of apps would need) really that much more expensive? To me it seems the real attraction is being able to hire from a giant pool of cheap, generic, interchangeable, fully replaceable developers.

And Android, and iOS.

You can reasonably easily share the bulk of your mac/iOS/tvOS/watchOS codebases, and apple is actively working to push that percentage higher. So really, you’re not looking at 1-3 “mac people”, but rather 1-3 “Apple people”.

Android dev is messy business, no question there, especially if you care enough about experience quality to test across a broad range of phones, OS versions, launchers, etc. It’s no wonder why the average Android dev team is 2x the size of the average iOS dev team. Not much you can do there but hope Google makes an effort to clean up (and it seems they are, albeit slowly).

Even with all these platform specialists accounted for, companies like Slack and Spotify aren’t hiring any more engineers than they would otherwise. The only difference is instead of hiring specialists, they’re hiring hordes of web front end.

Re: Electron 3.0.0

#88

Post by eschaton »

Spivak wrote: post #83
eschaton wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not the case.

Examples of apps which go the extra effort to use each platforms toolkit and look and behave natively?

The classic example of this was Microsoft Office; they tried to unify the UI and implementation for just the reasons you argue in the mid-1990s and faced a user revolt as a result. Subsequent versions were very much a rewind, with a native Mac human interface on a cross-platform core.

I don’t know how it is now as I haven’t used Office in about 15 years.

Re: Electron 3.0.0

#90

Post by scarface74 »

eschaton wrote: post #88
Spivak wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples of apps which go the extra effort to use each platforms toolkit and look and behave natively?

The classic example of this was Microsoft Office; they tried to unify the UI and implementation for just the reasons you argue in the mid-1990s and faced a user revolt as a result. Subsequent versions were very much a rewind, with a native Mac human interface on a cross-platform core. I don’t know how it is now as I haven’t used Office in about 15 years.

It feels very Mac like today.
Post reply on HN