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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)

#941

Post by pdimitar »

dilap wrote: post #857
pdimitar wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three of your points use the word "weird" which immediately puts them in the subjective category (hint: zero argumentative value). "No bounce scroll" is subjective as well, hence no real argument there as well. Non-native text boxes is a 50/50 issue. I get that it can be alienating for some and that's just as valid as me not caring. But it's still subjective and bears zero argumentative value as well. Telegram Deskto…

Well, clearly you're either not sensitive to or don't care about look-and-feel issues. To those of us that do care, it's a big deal. Just not being able to use C-f, C-b, C-e, C-a &c keyboard shortcuts in text fields is pretty much a deal-breaker for me. No argument here that Slack is hideously inefficient.

I don't think we're that much different actually.

Aesthetics do matter a lot but they must always take a back seat to efficiency, is what I'm saying.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#942

Post by TeMPOraL »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #375
Veen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call "trade-offs" appears to me to be developers externalizing their costs onto users. There are costs to developing desktop applications and developers don't want to pay them, so they make users pay for them in wasted hardware dollars, bandwidth, RAM, battery life, and poor integration.

Well, why would any developer or organization doing development "want" to pay those costs, as you suggest they should?

Because those costs grow orders of magnitude as they're externalized. $1000 spent during development can offset $1M in energy wasted by a million users. So they should want to pay those costs as responsible members of civilized society.

And if they don't want to, they should be forced to by said society.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#943

Post by xiaoma »

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…

>"Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it,"

Have you ever heard of League of Legends? It's a desktop application made in that time frame. It does 10 figures a year in revenue.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#944

Post by sametmax »

pdimitar wrote: post #762
camgunz wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for clarifying :) You're right, I missed the point. > people will use anything that allow them to do what they want the easiest way possible, not matter the cost and cleaness. I disagree, because people are implementing things in Rust right now even though it's harder than doing it in JS. Generally, they do that because they care about things like performance, safety, and maintainability. For them, "harder" is…

I'd give you a standing ovation if I could. So well said! It's heart-warming to know there are other people out there thinking exactly like myself. Nobody ever learns from history and it is full of examples of what happens in an industry where speed is valued more than quality.

But nobody disagree with that. We all know electron is doing it wrong and that it's going to end badly.

The debate here is about understanding why people are using it right now. Without acknowledging the reality, you can't change it.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#945

Post by Sophistifunk »

mlsarecmg wrote: post #910
Sophistifunk wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redux and co are still the same pattern fundamentally, it's just that the implementing code is spread throughout your stack, instead of in an "Observable" implementation. That combined with an optimisation allowing identity and state equality to be conflated.

I don't know what you're saying, this is the complete opposite. Redux was made to centralize, because observables are literally spread throughout the stack. The entire logic is combined in composeable containers, later wrapped in a single store. Flux pattern is also completely different in how it works, there's almost no similarity whatsoever. http://iweave.com/assets/blog/mvc_v_flux.png

Redux makes every single component check nextProps.foo !== this.props.foo, instead of just having them notified when it changes.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#946

Post by tigershark »

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…

Honestly seems quite sad that developers today know only one (quite awful) language and have no whatsoever interest to learn new things because they can just write an application (probably with a quality not much better than the aforementioned language) that can be used everywhere but taking a huge amount of unneeded resources. The thing that I like the most in software development is the ability to continuously learn new techniques and new, better, ways of solving problems. I'm really afraid to think what would have happened if VbScript would have won the race as the de facto standard for the web.. ..but actually thinking about it probably it would not have been that different from today. We would have had VisualElectron instead of Electron, but with all the same problems maybe in a slightly worse or slightly better language, depending from the point of view.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#947

Post by user5994461 »

kalleboo wrote: post #859
user5994461 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems... Really??? Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have. Don't try running on battery saving mode, seriously. I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions. ---- Fun Anecdote: I had to trial an ent…

> I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions. Are they all netbooks? Because those were crap the day they came out and even more crap 5 years later. You can find terrible discount desktop machines that can't handle anything just as easy as you can find terrible laptops. My laptop is 5 years old and the only time I feel a lack of perfo…

They are not crap by any standard, they are simply low spec.

A core i3/i5 starts at 150$, most devices don't have these expensive CPU.

Even a 1000$ macbook from 5 years ago would have one of the first i3/i5. It would struggle to read 1080p video, unless plugged to a wall plug with the span spinning seriously.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#948

Post by MarkMc »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #899
MarkMc wrote: post #889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, how about 'programmer'?

That leads to a very strange sentence since 'programmer' is already used. More importantly 'programmer' doesn't work well as "thing you don't want to be". Instead you've left that category of word entirely. "Dork" is about as minimally-derogatory as you can get without losing the meaning entirely. And it doesn't feed any kind of discrimination.

Ahh I understand your point now. For the record I meant 'less derogatory or not at all derogatory'.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#949

Post by notalaser »

magicalist wrote: post #913
notalaser wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

48x48 gifs with four frames of animation?

The GIFs were significantly more complex than the single emoji that the parent comment mentioned. Actually, I think even a four-frame 48x48 gif is more complex than that "single animated parrot emoji" :-).

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#950

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?

I switched back to iTerm2 last night. Deleted Hyper and Atom.

I found a patch with dark mode in iTerm which I'm using now: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/pull/318

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