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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)

#841

Post by mplewis »

mpweiher wrote: post #694
sametmax wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem here. Your post illustrate it perfectly. You just ignore what the market is saying because "you are right". You are completely missing the point.

Maybe you are ignoring the market? I work on Wunderlist. One of our key differentiators, the thing customers love , love , love , is native apps on the major platforms (iOS, macOS, Android, Windows), in addition to an outstanding Web app. We quickly got several million customers, were acquired by Microsoft for "an undisclosed amount". http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/2/8707883/microsoft-wunderlis...

Slack has a native app on every platform, too. Including Linux.

Users don't care what the app framework is. They just want something that isn't in a browser and does stuff like notifications. That's what native means to them.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#842

Post by mpweiher »

mplewis wrote: post #841
mpweiher wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you are ignoring the market? I work on Wunderlist. One of our key differentiators, the thing customers love , love , love , is native apps on the major platforms (iOS, macOS, Android, Windows), in addition to an outstanding Web app. We quickly got several million customers, were acquired by Microsoft for "an undisclosed amount". http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/2/8707883/microsoft-wunderlis...

Slack has a native app on every platform, too. Including Linux. Users don't care what the app framework is. They just want something that isn't in a browser and does stuff like notifications. That's what native means to them.

> Users don't care what the app framework is.

They don't care what the framework is. They do care, strongly, about how native something feels. Slack doesn't in lots of naggy and laggy little ways. Look up the "uncanny valley" of native apps.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#843

Post by copperx »

jnwatson wrote: post #687
petre wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why they haven't made Slack a web based chat app like Discord or Wire or even Skype is beyond me. I don't even use their native apps, just open a tab in my browser and run the corresponding web app.

They already do, just not on mobile.

I don't get it. If slack.com is a web-based chat, why doesn't the OP open Slack on his existing instance of Chrome?

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#844

Post by abalashov »

mikejmoffitt wrote: post #617
apetresc wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Allow me to humbly suggest:

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

I use it extensively for everyday Slack, where I don't care much about inline media and inline formatting. And for a text client, weechat + this plugin handle it pretty gracefully.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#845

Post by overgard »

ue_ wrote: post #829
overgard wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C is not that hard! If you're a programmer, and you don't know C, you're not good at your craft. I realize that sounds incredibly harsh but it's true: your job is to make a computer do a task efficiently. If you can't even read the language that makes that possible, you don't know what you're doing.

>If you're a programmer, and you don't know C, you're not good at your craft. Even as someone myself who knows (more or less) C, this is quite an elitist statement, and doesn't do justice to say, Lisp and people who use functional languages. The goal of programming isn't necessarily efficiency.

How is expecting competency elitist? Theres plenty of free resources to learn C. I learned C when I was 14.

Im not trying to claim low level knowledge of the machine is inherently better than high level knowlege. What I am claiming is you need both and knowing how this stuff works isnt a charming novelty reserved for the curious

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#846

Post by bobwaycott »

abiox wrote: post #737
bobwaycott wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything in the world of web-stack development has turned externalizing costs onto users as a core first principle.

it's been that way since forever. if you're not employing expensive top-ranked brilliant engineers writing aggressively optimized, completely bespoke c applications tuned to every cpu model's feature set and performance characteristics... you just might be externalizing. insofar as it benefits the budget, you should probably externalize as much as possible. consumers will provide the fitness function through deciding…

We're not even discussing aggressively optimized C vs web stack. We're talking about a massive segment of today's software developers not even bothering to learn competent C (or Obj-C, Swift, Java, whatever) to build a native application. Hell, it's about the very practice of calling Electron apps native to begin with. The same thing continues to hold across web stack everywhere—reach only for those things that don't require you to learn a new language/paradigm, letting you keep churning out the same thing you build in a browser and call it native for platform X, and let it be on the user to pony up the resources to use it.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#847

Post by andromeda__ »

migueloller wrote: post #16

> 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…

There still seems to be a big problem that Electron is addressing that these React Native solutions aren't bothered with: it seems that users need to have Windows 10 whereas if you look at the OS market share, Win 7 still has the most usage at almost 50%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

I would love to use React but if this is not addressed, there's no way I'm ignoring 1/2 users in the Windows ecosystem.

Is that the case or am I wrong? Can you run these React Native forks on Windows 7?

EDIT: Win 7 usage might be higher than is widely reported

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#848

Post by buremba »

lima wrote: post #601
buremba wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I hate that all of these companies try to convert their applications from tabs to dedicated processes. It would be a huge deal breaker if Chrome Apps could become a thing and replace them. Now I have 4 different Chrome apps running on my computer.

Chrome Apps aren't different from tabs, though.

My point was they could convert their web applications to Chrome Apps which has better native api support and experience if Chrome Apps could become a thing.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#849

Post by turrini »

notalaser wrote: post #53
Ambroos wrote: post #18

A lot of Slack's high (background) CPU usage is caused by GIFs, in my experience. Just did a quick check on my quadcore MBP, having Slack fullscreen out-of-view with nothing animated in view gives it a CPU usage of 0,1% with spikes up to 2,5%. Switch to a conversation with a single animated party parrot emoji, go to another fullscreen app once again, and CPU usage never drops below a whopping 22%. For an animated par…

> A lot of Slack's high (background) CPU usage is caused by GIFs, in my experience. Holy fuck, can you imagine the supercomputers that were required to display Geocities websites in the 1990s?

That was just gold

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#850

Post by ori_b »

infogulch wrote: post #512
kungtotte wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did you switch? Atom was damned near unusable around 1.0, and VSCode was only a little better. The difference to now is night and day.

Atom and VSCode are in different leagues with respect to performance, and the difference is growing with time. If you think the reason that Atom is slow is because of Electron, VSCode is the counterexample.

If VSCode isn't slow because of electron, what's the reason it's slow?
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