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Except for the millions of people using apps such as Slack or Discord or people using the new Keybase desktop offerings, or people using Atom, or VSCode. Elect

Except for the millions of people using apps such as Slack or Discord or people using the new Keybase desktop offerings, or people using Atom, or VSCode. Electron (sadly imo) is being used in plenty of newly developed cross platform applications, a lot having users that have no clue what hackernews is.

sho_hn 10y ago
Is Electron newsworthy? Sure. At the same time there's vastly more paid Qt devs than Electron devs at this time, and more apps by orders of magnitude, including many with millions of users, and big new ones every week. Along with many application domains Electron isn't even an option in. But you wouldn't know it from HN coverage.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
problems 10y ago
None of these apps feel quite right though. Even Atom still doesn't do DPI scaling properly. VSCode does, but opening 2 panes sometimes causes it to break. Sample problem (left pane blurry, right pane sharp - view at 1:1 scale on ~100dpi screen to notice it easiest, but it's quite visible to me with scaling even): https://i.imgur.com/Ju0UK2K.png https://i.imgur.com/Ju0UK2K.png
- zer0t3ch 10y ago
  I've never had any issue with Discord feeling "not quite right".
  - mememachine 10y ago
    You dont know what he means? They dont feel like native, they feel like web apps.
    - zer0t3ch 10y ago
      I have noticed that with some Electron apps in the past, but I had actually never noticed that with Discord. I thought it was native for the first 4 months I was using it because it was just done so well, no lag and such. The one thing that usually gives away electron apps is their lack of custom right-click handling, meaning a right-click will give you the generic context menu you would normally see in a browser. Discord seems to handle all right-clicks with their own context menus which is why I never caught onto it at first.
      - mememachine 10y ago
        What gives away electron to me is the really giant non-native UI elements. Its like everything is as bloated as the underlying system!
        zer0t3ch 10y ago
        > really giant non-native UI elements You act like this is a problem exclusive to Electron apps. People have been doing shit like that forever.
      - problems 10y ago
        Sample weird behavior from Discord: Make the window too small and the buttons overlap in the titlebar. I didn't even pick an extremely small size or anything, this was about half my screen width on my Macbook. But this is the kind of thing that making a proper native app forces you to think about, but that making an Electron app often doesn't. http://i.imgur.com/MOaESLC.png http://i.imgur.com/MOaESLC.png I can pretty much tell within a minute of starting an Electron app because things just don't feel right no matter what the app is. Sibling mememachine is also pretty accurate - Discord is very oversized like many other Electron apps. Not using native platform widgets is also incredibly noticable. Every time you're not using native platform buttons or menus it's so easy to tell, it feels weirdly slow, has excessive gaudy animations, the spacing is wrong, text size is wrong, etc. That's not to say that it can't be done right just that you're on an existing platform and that consistency is key.
baldfat 10y ago
I use RStudio on a daily bases and it works amazingly well. VS Code has become my daily driver on Linux and Windows. I think there are plenty of good examples of electron apps and bad electron apps. Qt is great but electron has certainly been getting better and better.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  Those load times on Electron apps, though... I'm a big fan of VS Code but 30 second reload times when updating extensions are a real PITA.
  - CJefferson 10y ago
    There is I think something up with your computer, or your VS Code. I have a 4 year old mac and VS Code goes from closed to a file opened in about 4 seconds. Still a stupid amount of time for a text editor, but no-where near 30.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    I have a 8 year old Dell running OpenSUSE. I counted 9 seconds to open the app. It was 6 seconds to reload after updating 5 extensions.

sho_hn 10y ago

Is Electron newsworthy? Sure. At the same time there's vastly more paid Qt devs than Electron devs at this time, and more apps by orders of magnitude, including many with millions of users, and big new ones every week. Along with many application domains Electron isn't even an option in. But you wouldn't know it from HN coverage.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

problems 10y ago

None of these apps feel quite right though. Even Atom still doesn't do DPI scaling properly. VSCode does, but opening 2 panes sometimes causes it to break. Sample problem (left pane blurry, right pane sharp - view at 1:1 scale on ~100dpi screen to notice it easiest, but it's quite visible to me with scaling even): https://i.imgur.com/Ju0UK2K.png https://i.imgur.com/Ju0UK2K.png

zer0t3ch 10y ago
I've never had any issue with Discord feeling "not quite right".
- mememachine 10y ago
  You dont know what he means? They dont feel like native, they feel like web apps.
  - zer0t3ch 10y ago
    I have noticed that with some Electron apps in the past, but I had actually never noticed that with Discord. I thought it was native for the first 4 months I was using it because it was just done so well, no lag and such. The one thing that usually gives away electron apps is their lack of custom right-click handling, meaning a right-click will give you the generic context menu you would normally see in a browser. Discord seems to handle all right-clicks with their own context menus which is why I never caught onto it at first.
    - mememachine 10y ago
      What gives away electron to me is the really giant non-native UI elements. Its like everything is as bloated as the underlying system!
      - zer0t3ch 10y ago
        > really giant non-native UI elements You act like this is a problem exclusive to Electron apps. People have been doing shit like that forever.
    - problems 10y ago
      Sample weird behavior from Discord: Make the window too small and the buttons overlap in the titlebar. I didn't even pick an extremely small size or anything, this was about half my screen width on my Macbook. But this is the kind of thing that making a proper native app forces you to think about, but that making an Electron app often doesn't. http://i.imgur.com/MOaESLC.png http://i.imgur.com/MOaESLC.png I can pretty much tell within a minute of starting an Electron app because things just don't feel right no matter what the app is. Sibling mememachine is also pretty accurate - Discord is very oversized like many other Electron apps. Not using native platform widgets is also incredibly noticable. Every time you're not using native platform buttons or menus it's so easy to tell, it feels weirdly slow, has excessive gaudy animations, the spacing is wrong, text size is wrong, etc. That's not to say that it can't be done right just that you're on an existing platform and that consistency is key.

baldfat 10y ago

I use RStudio on a daily bases and it works amazingly well. VS Code has become my daily driver on Linux and Windows. I think there are plenty of good examples of electron apps and bad electron apps. Qt is great but electron has certainly been getting better and better.

santaclaus 10y ago
Those load times on Electron apps, though... I'm a big fan of VS Code but 30 second reload times when updating extensions are a real PITA.
- CJefferson 10y ago
  There is I think something up with your computer, or your VS Code. I have a 4 year old mac and VS Code goes from closed to a file opened in about 4 seconds. Still a stupid amount of time for a text editor, but no-where near 30.
- baldfat 10y ago
  I have a 8 year old Dell running OpenSUSE. I counted 9 seconds to open the app. It was 6 seconds to reload after updating 5 extensions.