5 ms·

I think it's easy to argue about tools, but take a look at popular desktop apps these days: Slack, Atom, VSCode, Spotify, WhatsApp Desktop... they're all built

I think it's easy to argue about tools, but take a look at popular desktop apps these days: Slack, Atom, VSCode, Spotify, WhatsApp Desktop... they're all built on Electron or the Chromium Embedded Framework. It seems the community has spoken, and no longer considers Java / Qt the right tool for many jobs.

gbugniot 10y ago
So tell when a Photoshop, a real Visual Studio, a SolidWorks, or any big/professional software written with Electron-like tech will be out there.
royjacobs 10y ago
I think you have a very narrow view of "the community" and what constitutes "popular desktop apps". What about applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Cubase, Logic? Basically anything that does more than show a couple of editor panes. I'd love to see these kinds of things built in Electron but as far as I can tell this has not happened yet. In these areas languages like C++ and frameworks like Qt are still really really popular. Not to mention embedded development, of course.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > What about applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Cubase, Logic? That's the difference between toys and tools. Most of the popular applications are toys, and this saddens me a lot personally, because humanity is wasting the potential it has with all that cheap computing available. > I'd love to see these kinds of things built in Electron but as far as I can tell this has not happened yet. I don't see it happening any time soon. Web is not meant for serious tools. Compare Microsoft Office and Google's butt office suite. One is a tool, other is a toy that looks nice for simple documents, but is utterly unusable when your document/spreadsheet grows beyond more than a couple of pages.
  - marknutter 10y ago
    > That's the difference between toys and tools. Most of the popular applications are toys, and this saddens me a lot personally, because humanity is wasting the potential it has with all that cheap computing available. I always wonder if pretentious people realize their pretentious and simply don't care, or they're actually oblivious. Perhaps you could enlighten me? The difference between a "toy" and a "tool" is whether or not something is mainly for fun or mainly for being productive. It has nothing to do with the process used to build it.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > I always wonder if pretentious people realize their pretentious and simply don't care, or they're actually oblivious. Perhaps you could enlighten me? They're just tired and try to highlight some problems that others don't care about. > The difference between a "toy" and a "tool" is whether or not something is mainly for fun or mainly for being productive. It has nothing to do with the process used to build it. The difference is the goal - is it supposed to help people be productive at their task, or is it just supposed to make such impression while in fact being there to extract money from naive customers? (Or is it a worse-is-better half-assed 20% solution?). Whether you like it or not, performance is a big part of usefulness of application. I brought up MS Office and Google's cloud-based solutions for a reason - only one of them can handle the load a professional user needs to handle. Quite often it's literally like a difference between a metal hammer[0] and a plastic one[1]. Both can, in theory, be used to drive nails, but there is kind of a difference in performance. [0] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Claw-hammer.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Claw-ham... [1] - http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/plastic-hammer-2181534.jpg http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/plastic-hammer-2181534.jpg
      - marknutter 10y ago
        So what you're saying is, all tools need to be designed for the power user or they're toys. I guess I should return my $10 hammer I bought from Home Depot and replace it with the $225 Stiletto TB15MS solid titanium hammer (http://www.amazon.com/Stiletto-TB15MS-TiBone-Titanium-Straight/dp/B00079R1YW http://www.amazon.com/Stiletto-TB15MS-TiBone-Titanium-Straig...).
  - patates 10y ago
    > Web is not meant for serious tools. Compare Microsoft Office and Google's butt office suite. Well, isn't that an ambiguous claim with a weak anecdotal evidence. What is a "serious tool"? We have our email, crm, analytics, (only) shop, document versioning, etc. online. Actually, the native applications I use are just Visual Studio (can be replaced by code), Sql Management Studio (many web-based alternatives) and the browser itself - that being the only type of application I use with no web-based alternative, which could be seen as an operating system.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > Well, isn't that an ambiguous claim with a weak anecdotal evidence. Try working on a 20-page document or 5-page-long spreadsheet and see how long it takes before you get pissed off at the performance. Unless you're oblivious to it - I'm starting to believe more and more people don't even expect anymore that computers can work without constant lags and pauses. > the native applications I use are just Visual Studio (can be replaced by code) Now can it, really? > Sql Management Studio (many web-based alternatives) With even remotely similar feature sets?
      - patates 10y ago
        We have a giant list of archived support tickets in Office 365. They can be navigated nearly as fast as they can be navigated in native Excel app, through the 365 web app. I replaced Visual Studio already with Code for my personal projects. I expect it is just a matter of time before companies start to consider doing that too. Is it feature-complete? No, but not because it is an Electron-app, but because it's just young. SQL Server doesn't work on platforms other than Windows so the motivation for coming-up a feature-complete alternative is little. I could even then find a couple promising projects with a web search. For other databases such as Postgres and Mongo, there are many alternatives which provide more than their native GUIs. Rethink's main GUI is web-based, for example. A database management interface isn't challenging to implement as a web-app because web-apps are limited toys, but it is hard to do right in general.
        10y ago
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    Meh. Microsoft Office pisses me off more with its constant crashes and weird bugs than Google Docs does. The latter has less functionality, but at least it's stable. Not to mention the vast majority of users don't need the advanced functionality anyway. If you're doing serious publishing work, sure, go ahead and use MS office. But 90% of common use cases are easily satisfied with Google Docs.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > Microsoft Office pisses me off more with its constant crashes and weird bugs than Google Docs does. Crashes / weird bugs and MS Office... that's something new to me. I always considered MS Office to be a set of some of the most stable applications I've ever seen. Do you do something atypical, so that the bugs/crashes could be related to a platform or some rarely used features? I'm asking out of curiosity. Google Docs et al. don't just lack advanced functionality, they lack a lot of quite basic functionality too. But my point wrt. webapps is also one of ergonomics. I do a lot of work in Google Docs and Spreadsheets due to external reasons, and I absolutely hate the experience. No matter how fast a computer I use, the lag on the Google's office suite is very annoying and distracting. Like with some IDEs which are slow enough to make one unable to ever enter the state of flow, Google's spreadsheets routinely double the time I am spending on a task due to simple lag on almost every operation.
      - enraged_camel 10y ago
        >>Do you do something atypical, so that the bugs/crashes could be related to a platform or some rarely used features? I'm asking out of curiosity. Not that I can tell. I mean I run it inside a Windows 7 VM, but other than that, nothing atypical. One example of a bug that I can think of (because it happens consistently) is that Outlook 2013 taskbar icon shows the orange envelope to indicate that I have unread mail... when I don't have any. It drives me absolutely bonkers. I've also ran into more serious issues, for example yesterday when I pasted something from a web page into MS Word and it froze and crashed.
  - wstrange 10y ago
    For 99% of business documents, Google Docs works just fine. Your needs are different, and that is cool - but it does not relegate web apps to "toy" status.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      My needs are pretty standard. I run an NGO and have some amount of paperwork and data tracking to do in a word processor and spreadsheet application. Due to the collaboration requirements, we're stuck with Google cloud suite (the choice was made back when there were zero reasonable cloud-enabled alternatives). Google's office suite is theoretically capable of doing most of the things I need[0], but the omnipresent lag when you try to work with a bigger document or (more often) several documents at once is very annoying and slows things down. Half a second here, five seconds there, and it all adds up to significant frustration. There's a significant difference between "theoretically X can be done with it" and "it is useful for doing X". You can drive nails with a plastic hammer after all (and most people don't even need the "additional" feature of pulling them out). [0] - which is partly because I reduce expectations of what I can do. Think of it as generalized Blub paradox - you think in terms of the tools you use. Get a better tool, and suddenly you can do more, do it better and do it faster.
albeva 10y ago
Atom and VSCode despite all the hype are subpar editors. Slow and resource hungry. Maybe suitable for script kiddies of today ... Slack is by no means a good sample of solid engineering. Spotify last I checked was native app written in c++. What's App is just wrapped website.
- ntlve 10y ago
  Spotify used to be fully native, nowadays the UI is done in various web technologies while the heavy lifting (streaming audio etc) is done in c++.
svink 10y ago
Your examples kind of prove the opposite point, these are not ALL popular apps, they are just popular "toy" apps. You weren't able to give a single example of a popular major application.
- BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
  How exactly are Atom and Code "toy applications"?
  - royjacobs 10y ago
    They are vastly less complex than other applications listed here (e.g. Photoshop).
    - patates 10y ago
      There are many web based ERPs and CRMs, some of which are way, way more complex than Photoshop. Given one has access to their algorithms, I don't see why Photoshop would be impossible to implement on top of WebGL. Photoshop UI doesn't have the "native feel" anyway. I think it's just a matter of time until Adobe comes with a 90% feature-complete web-based PS.
      - royjacobs 10y ago
        I'm sorry I wasn't more clear but I'm not talking just about the UI. It's also being able to give realtime feedback and do hugely CPU consuming tasks, which is essentially the core of Photoshop. Can you give examples of ERPs or CRMs that are "way, way more complex than Photoshop" though? It would be nice to be able to compare.
  - svink 10y ago
    By "toy" I don't mean that their purpose is necessarily entertainment, but that the difficulty of building them is not comparable to many popular desktop apps - the list is not representative. Like building a toy plane vs a real plane - the difficulty, not the purpose. Major computer games are not "toy apps" in this sense. Sorry if I was unclear.
blub 10y ago
The world development community is a weee bit larger than five. Neither is text editor and wrapper for a website "many jobs" ;) I've seen many complaints about Spotify on e.g. Reddit - specifically about the fact that it's no longer native. Seen also many complaints about bloat and slowness in Atom & VScode. I understand why this toolkit is chosen, but companies can only push so much before the customers also push back against the decrease in qulity.
sievebrain 10y ago
Comparing the developer experience between them makes it hard to argue that HTML/CSS/JS are the right tool for building GUI apps. The awkwardness of the web 'platform' is just huge, in comparison, even ignoring the performance issues. Atom and VSCode, for instance, have a long way to go to catch up with the real Visual Studio or IntelliJ. The real reason you're seeing apps based on Electron these days is that it's easy to hire HTML/CSS developers. That doesn't mean these are good platforms though. I remember when the bulk of apps were being written in Visual Basic because it was easy to hire VB devs (lots of people learned VBA via MS Office).
- oceanswave 10y ago
  "Atom and VSCode, for instance, have a long way to go to catch up with the real Visual Studio or IntelliJ." You're right. They need to catch up to using 5.8 GB for Visual Studio and 480MB for IntellJ to start. :)
wiz21 10y ago
I love your comment. But it basically says something else : programming is a lot about fashion. And nowadays, HTML/JS/CSS is fashionable and Qt is not anymore. Everybody can yell that Qt/Gtk or even the MS stuff is the better tool for desktop apps, it won't change anything. There's 0 objectivity in the choice. The young boys just think in HTML/JS, so we'd better adapt :-)

gbugniot 10y ago

So tell when a Photoshop, a real Visual Studio, a SolidWorks, or any big/professional software written with Electron-like tech will be out there.

royjacobs 10y ago

I think you have a very narrow view of "the community" and what constitutes "popular desktop apps". What about applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Cubase, Logic? Basically anything that does more than show a couple of editor panes. I'd love to see these kinds of things built in Electron but as far as I can tell this has not happened yet. In these areas languages like C++ and frameworks like Qt are still really really popular. Not to mention embedded development, of course.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> What about applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Cubase, Logic? That's the difference between toys and tools. Most of the popular applications are toys, and this saddens me a lot personally, because humanity is wasting the potential it has with all that cheap computing available. > I'd love to see these kinds of things built in Electron but as far as I can tell this has not happened yet. I don't see it happening any time soon. Web is not meant for serious tools. Compare Microsoft Office and Google's butt office suite. One is a tool, other is a toy that looks nice for simple documents, but is utterly unusable when your document/spreadsheet grows beyond more than a couple of pages.
- marknutter 10y ago
  > That's the difference between toys and tools. Most of the popular applications are toys, and this saddens me a lot personally, because humanity is wasting the potential it has with all that cheap computing available. I always wonder if pretentious people realize their pretentious and simply don't care, or they're actually oblivious. Perhaps you could enlighten me? The difference between a "toy" and a "tool" is whether or not something is mainly for fun or mainly for being productive. It has nothing to do with the process used to build it.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > I always wonder if pretentious people realize their pretentious and simply don't care, or they're actually oblivious. Perhaps you could enlighten me? They're just tired and try to highlight some problems that others don't care about. > The difference between a "toy" and a "tool" is whether or not something is mainly for fun or mainly for being productive. It has nothing to do with the process used to build it. The difference is the goal - is it supposed to help people be productive at their task, or is it just supposed to make such impression while in fact being there to extract money from naive customers? (Or is it a worse-is-better half-assed 20% solution?). Whether you like it or not, performance is a big part of usefulness of application. I brought up MS Office and Google's cloud-based solutions for a reason - only one of them can handle the load a professional user needs to handle. Quite often it's literally like a difference between a metal hammer[0] and a plastic one[1]. Both can, in theory, be used to drive nails, but there is kind of a difference in performance. [0] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Claw-hammer.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Claw-ham... [1] - http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/plastic-hammer-2181534.jpg http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/plastic-hammer-2181534.jpg
    - marknutter 10y ago
      So what you're saying is, all tools need to be designed for the power user or they're toys. I guess I should return my $10 hammer I bought from Home Depot and replace it with the $225 Stiletto TB15MS solid titanium hammer (http://www.amazon.com/Stiletto-TB15MS-TiBone-Titanium-Straight/dp/B00079R1YW http://www.amazon.com/Stiletto-TB15MS-TiBone-Titanium-Straig...).
- patates 10y ago
  > Web is not meant for serious tools. Compare Microsoft Office and Google's butt office suite. Well, isn't that an ambiguous claim with a weak anecdotal evidence. What is a "serious tool"? We have our email, crm, analytics, (only) shop, document versioning, etc. online. Actually, the native applications I use are just Visual Studio (can be replaced by code), Sql Management Studio (many web-based alternatives) and the browser itself - that being the only type of application I use with no web-based alternative, which could be seen as an operating system.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Well, isn't that an ambiguous claim with a weak anecdotal evidence. Try working on a 20-page document or 5-page-long spreadsheet and see how long it takes before you get pissed off at the performance. Unless you're oblivious to it - I'm starting to believe more and more people don't even expect anymore that computers can work without constant lags and pauses. > the native applications I use are just Visual Studio (can be replaced by code) Now can it, really? > Sql Management Studio (many web-based alternatives) With even remotely similar feature sets?
    - patates 10y ago
      We have a giant list of archived support tickets in Office 365. They can be navigated nearly as fast as they can be navigated in native Excel app, through the 365 web app. I replaced Visual Studio already with Code for my personal projects. I expect it is just a matter of time before companies start to consider doing that too. Is it feature-complete? No, but not because it is an Electron-app, but because it's just young. SQL Server doesn't work on platforms other than Windows so the motivation for coming-up a feature-complete alternative is little. I could even then find a couple promising projects with a web search. For other databases such as Postgres and Mongo, there are many alternatives which provide more than their native GUIs. Rethink's main GUI is web-based, for example. A database management interface isn't challenging to implement as a web-app because web-apps are limited toys, but it is hard to do right in general.
      - 10y ago
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Meh. Microsoft Office pisses me off more with its constant crashes and weird bugs than Google Docs does. The latter has less functionality, but at least it's stable. Not to mention the vast majority of users don't need the advanced functionality anyway. If you're doing serious publishing work, sure, go ahead and use MS office. But 90% of common use cases are easily satisfied with Google Docs.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Microsoft Office pisses me off more with its constant crashes and weird bugs than Google Docs does. Crashes / weird bugs and MS Office... that's something new to me. I always considered MS Office to be a set of some of the most stable applications I've ever seen. Do you do something atypical, so that the bugs/crashes could be related to a platform or some rarely used features? I'm asking out of curiosity. Google Docs et al. don't just lack advanced functionality, they lack a lot of quite basic functionality too. But my point wrt. webapps is also one of ergonomics. I do a lot of work in Google Docs and Spreadsheets due to external reasons, and I absolutely hate the experience. No matter how fast a computer I use, the lag on the Google's office suite is very annoying and distracting. Like with some IDEs which are slow enough to make one unable to ever enter the state of flow, Google's spreadsheets routinely double the time I am spending on a task due to simple lag on almost every operation.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      >>Do you do something atypical, so that the bugs/crashes could be related to a platform or some rarely used features? I'm asking out of curiosity. Not that I can tell. I mean I run it inside a Windows 7 VM, but other than that, nothing atypical. One example of a bug that I can think of (because it happens consistently) is that Outlook 2013 taskbar icon shows the orange envelope to indicate that I have unread mail... when I don't have any. It drives me absolutely bonkers. I've also ran into more serious issues, for example yesterday when I pasted something from a web page into MS Word and it froze and crashed.
- wstrange 10y ago
  For 99% of business documents, Google Docs works just fine. Your needs are different, and that is cool - but it does not relegate web apps to "toy" status.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    My needs are pretty standard. I run an NGO and have some amount of paperwork and data tracking to do in a word processor and spreadsheet application. Due to the collaboration requirements, we're stuck with Google cloud suite (the choice was made back when there were zero reasonable cloud-enabled alternatives). Google's office suite is theoretically capable of doing most of the things I need[0], but the omnipresent lag when you try to work with a bigger document or (more often) several documents at once is very annoying and slows things down. Half a second here, five seconds there, and it all adds up to significant frustration. There's a significant difference between "theoretically X can be done with it" and "it is useful for doing X". You can drive nails with a plastic hammer after all (and most people don't even need the "additional" feature of pulling them out). [0] - which is partly because I reduce expectations of what I can do. Think of it as generalized Blub paradox - you think in terms of the tools you use. Get a better tool, and suddenly you can do more, do it better and do it faster.

albeva 10y ago

Atom and VSCode despite all the hype are subpar editors. Slow and resource hungry. Maybe suitable for script kiddies of today ... Slack is by no means a good sample of solid engineering. Spotify last I checked was native app written in c++. What's App is just wrapped website.

ntlve 10y ago
Spotify used to be fully native, nowadays the UI is done in various web technologies while the heavy lifting (streaming audio etc) is done in c++.

svink 10y ago

Your examples kind of prove the opposite point, these are not ALL popular apps, they are just popular "toy" apps. You weren't able to give a single example of a popular major application.

BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
How exactly are Atom and Code "toy applications"?
- royjacobs 10y ago
  They are vastly less complex than other applications listed here (e.g. Photoshop).
  - patates 10y ago
    There are many web based ERPs and CRMs, some of which are way, way more complex than Photoshop. Given one has access to their algorithms, I don't see why Photoshop would be impossible to implement on top of WebGL. Photoshop UI doesn't have the "native feel" anyway. I think it's just a matter of time until Adobe comes with a 90% feature-complete web-based PS.
    - royjacobs 10y ago
      I'm sorry I wasn't more clear but I'm not talking just about the UI. It's also being able to give realtime feedback and do hugely CPU consuming tasks, which is essentially the core of Photoshop. Can you give examples of ERPs or CRMs that are "way, way more complex than Photoshop" though? It would be nice to be able to compare.
- svink 10y ago
  By "toy" I don't mean that their purpose is necessarily entertainment, but that the difficulty of building them is not comparable to many popular desktop apps - the list is not representative. Like building a toy plane vs a real plane - the difficulty, not the purpose. Major computer games are not "toy apps" in this sense. Sorry if I was unclear.

blub 10y ago

The world development community is a weee bit larger than five. Neither is text editor and wrapper for a website "many jobs" ;) I've seen many complaints about Spotify on e.g. Reddit - specifically about the fact that it's no longer native. Seen also many complaints about bloat and slowness in Atom & VScode. I understand why this toolkit is chosen, but companies can only push so much before the customers also push back against the decrease in qulity.

sievebrain 10y ago

Comparing the developer experience between them makes it hard to argue that HTML/CSS/JS are the right tool for building GUI apps. The awkwardness of the web 'platform' is just huge, in comparison, even ignoring the performance issues. Atom and VSCode, for instance, have a long way to go to catch up with the real Visual Studio or IntelliJ. The real reason you're seeing apps based on Electron these days is that it's easy to hire HTML/CSS developers. That doesn't mean these are good platforms though. I remember when the bulk of apps were being written in Visual Basic because it was easy to hire VB devs (lots of people learned VBA via MS Office).

oceanswave 10y ago
"Atom and VSCode, for instance, have a long way to go to catch up with the real Visual Studio or IntelliJ." You're right. They need to catch up to using 5.8 GB for Visual Studio and 480MB for IntellJ to start. :)

wiz21 10y ago

I love your comment. But it basically says something else : programming is a lot about fashion. And nowadays, HTML/JS/CSS is fashionable and Qt is not anymore. Everybody can yell that Qt/Gtk or even the MS stuff is the better tool for desktop apps, it won't change anything. There's 0 objectivity in the choice. The young boys just think in HTML/JS, so we'd better adapt :-)