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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

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Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#991

Post by mcgrath_sh »

_jal wrote: post #252
ballenf wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. Is that true from a user's perspective? The average user I know would not have the idea that Slack is somehow inherently worse than say MS Word or any other truly native app they use everyday. What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Slack starts up too fast for me to read the little quotation (penultimate Macbook Pro…

> Is that true from a user's perspective? It is for this user. > What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Far better resource management, one would hope, for starters. As the article pointed out, when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MB…

I know I am really late to this, but one of the things I have been meaning to try is running Electron apps that have Web Apps with [Fluid](http://fluidapp.com). I think this may give me the perks without some of the drawbacks. I am not really sure, but it is an experiment I would like to try out.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#992

Post by FridgeSeal »

mlsarecmg wrote: post #755
true_religion wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plug…

> JS doesn't have a problem displaying json as json...

You know what else doesn't have a problem doing this? Literally any other programming language or tool that I've ever used to look at/edit Json.

> Hyperterm, it does things no other shell can do...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....

Any pretty much any other terminal built with flexibility and extensibility in mind (even the base terminal in Linux can handle links lol, that's definitely not exclusive to js). ZSH springs to mind, with the benefit of being written in Case, so that you know, it's actually fast...

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

Ah yes, including the freedom to not open any binary file, or any file >2mb in size!

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#993

Post by FridgeSeal »

seanwilson wrote: post #768
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…

> 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". Agree fully with this. I find the complaints about how appalling it is that apps use a few extra 100MB of RAM and disk space really tiresome and impractical when laptops + desktops typically have lots of RAM and disk space now. M…

"Everyone has Jesus of memory, or doesn't matter if we chew through a bunch of it because we were to lazy to use the right tool for the job".

Just because it's there doesn't mean you need to use it all, that's like spending your whole paycheck at once because "you'll get another one in 2 weeks!". Any application that does the same job with less resources and the same or greater performance is unequivocally, objectively better.

Also, benefits of claims like easier and faster updated are rendered pretty moot when developers next spend that time changing things for the sake of it: Spotify app feels like it has since pointless, un-requested UI change every month. And VSCode can't even update Idle, decor that being one of the lauded benefits...

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#994

Post by jaredcheeda »

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…

What about NW.js, It's the real hero here. They spent 5 years building up the platform, being used by thousands of companies and apps, basically inventing this technology; just to have GitHub buy up their intern and pay him to make a shitty knockoff called "atom-shell". You're excited because someone tossed a marketing department at a shitty knockoff?

NW.js uses less resources (less ram, smaller distribution sizes).

It is updated more often (within 24 hours of every Chromium and Node.js release, ensuring access to latest technology).

It supports about twice as many OS's (XP+, OSX 10.6+, Debian 8, Ubuntu 10+). Electron doesn't even care enough about Linux to merge in simple bug fixes.

It's much easier to get started with and takes a no-nonsense approach to everything. (thejaredwilcurt.github.io/website/quickstart.html)

Allows for HTML or JS entry for apps.

It offers actual source code protection, and even recently updated this so that there is no longer a performance hit when using it. Which is a pretty serious technical achievement.

The only thing wrong with it is that it's got a shitty name/logo, and has a smaller ecosystem. If you can get passed that you will have a much nicer experience.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#995

Post by 52-6F-62 »

alkonaut wrote: post #123
52-6F-62 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put simply: time to market. Experienced front-end devs with a designer on hand could put together the UI inside of a day, with a workable user experience. Hell, if you're not afraid of bloating in the codebase, you could use a large number of libraries to put together a basic, working version inside of a day or two. Stretch that to a couple of weeks (at most) and you have a prototype you can release. The proof is in…

> Experienced front-end devs That's the problem right there(?). People bringing a DOM to the desktop because the developers were fluent in JS. > time to market If there were no drawbacks in terms of complexity/performance/size etc then I'd agree, but now when you have a perf issue that is too large it might be a huge issue to fix. You also only get one chance for a first impression - and poor performance is a huge tu…

Definitely won't argue with you here. Like most things that are gradually corrupted the root cause is money.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#996

Post by hawkins »

mcgrath_sh wrote: post #991
_jal wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that true from a user's perspective? It is for this user. > What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac? Far better resource management, one would hope, for starters. As the article pointed out, when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem. It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MB…

I know I am really late to this, but one of the things I have been meaning to try is running Electron apps that have Web Apps with [Fluid]( http://fluidapp.com ). I think this may give me the perks without some of the drawbacks. I am not really sure, but it is an experiment I would like to try out.

I've never heard of Fluid before, but it seems to be a glorified shortcut with minor features such as notification badges. I really can't tell how this can integrate with Electron at all.

Electron would have you write a web app and package it as an app installed to your Applications folder just like any native app. You'll write this code in JS, HTML, CSS and use Electron APIs.

Fluid also would have you write this in JS, HTML, CSS but use Fluid APIs instead. The two compete for the same role in that sense.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#997

Post by samuell »

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…

If more developers had a second look at FreePascal/Lazarus [1], they'd realize they could do pretty much the same thing, but with native compiled speed, minimal memory usage (no bundled JREs) on all the desktop platforms.

It's graphical GUI builder is out of this world, and it works flawlessly on all three desktop platforms. It did even compile without a single code change on windows, after I finished coding in ubuntu, a utility tool for some researchers in my organization [2].

And about the language ... I finished my utility tool project in 80 hours, from initial concept to happy customer, while learning the language in the process.

It is really such a shame that people have so strong aversions against Pascal, for no good reason other than subjective feelings.

[1] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

[2] https://github.com/nbisweden/mdc-file-export

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#998

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

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…

Thanks, you summarized my thoughts.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#999

Post by tertius »

sametmax wrote: post #150
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 users/clients/bosses want everything, now, and for free so...

Free things give continuous hassle. People on business don't want hassle. They pass on free except if they're very inexperienced.

Re: Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

#1000

Post by jitbit »

Just reminding everyone that Telegram (a self-funded company, also a messenger) builds cool NATIVE clients for all platforms.

And Slack (a company valued at $4 billion) writes some intern-level Electron apps.

This comes from a desktop dev living in Europe (also frontend dev, backend dev, "you name it" dev).

This goes to you bay area folks, you hipster-coders, JS-framework lovers ;) No offense.

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