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I built Collate (https://collatenotes.com https://collatenotes.com) with Electron and I'm a huge fan. Electron does has its downsides but I think that it's ecli

I built Collate (https://collatenotes.com https://collatenotes.com) with Electron and I'm a huge fan. Electron does has its downsides but I think that it's eclipsed by the upsides. For collate, those upsides are: 1. Ease of building and distributing packages with Electron-Builder. I'm able to build for all three operating systems on my Mac, took a few hours to set up. 2. Access to the vast NPM library for all sorts of functionality. 3. Ability to use CSS libraries for styling. I'm no designer so it saves me some time. Collate uses Bulma for styling. From what I've seen, users are more than happy to have an application that solves their need no matter what it's created in. Most people don't really think about file sizes, or the fact that Chromium is packaged with Node, they just want their problem solved without visual or performance hiccups. If it wasn't for Electron, Collate would be a very different application or non-existant. I think people need to look at Electron as opening the door to more possibilities.

nirvdrum 9y ago
FWIW, I didn't mind the overhead of Electron when I only used a couple apps built with it. Now that that number is increasing, I find myself having to monitor resources & battery life and selectively killing apps. I have concerns that this approach isn't going to scale.
- toddmorey 9y ago
  This is a really good point. Could two electron apps share a chrome runtime? Has to be a way to make this more efficient.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    They could but cannot as electron versions are different between every app.
romanovcode 9y ago
The only good point Electron has is 1. All other points are obsolete. - You can find libraries for "all sorts of functionality" with ease for native languages - Swift, C#, Python (Mac, Win, Linux). - In the end the ability to use CSS is harming user because now you don't have default OS element styling and every app is using it's own styling for things like buttons - this is very bad.
seanwilson 9y ago
> If it wasn't for Electron, Collate would be a very different application or non-existant. I think people need to look at Electron as opening the door to more possibilities. Exactly. If you're building an app yourself you'd never have the resources to make a native app for Mac, Windows and Linux. Nothing is perfect in software development. Electron is a decent tradeoff for certain projects. Regular customers aren't going to even consider disk space or memory usage unlike many vocal commenters in this community.
jedikv 9y ago
>"From what I've seen, users are more than happy to have an application that solves their need no matter what it's created in. Most people don't really think about file sizes, or the fact that Chromium is packaged with Node, they just want their problem solved without visual or performance hiccups." To be frank, most users often don't have a better performant alternative (outside of maybe a browser tab) so it seems like a redundant point.

nirvdrum 9y ago

FWIW, I didn't mind the overhead of Electron when I only used a couple apps built with it. Now that that number is increasing, I find myself having to monitor resources & battery life and selectively killing apps. I have concerns that this approach isn't going to scale.

toddmorey 9y ago
This is a really good point. Could two electron apps share a chrome runtime? Has to be a way to make this more efficient.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  They could but cannot as electron versions are different between every app.

romanovcode 9y ago

The only good point Electron has is 1. All other points are obsolete. - You can find libraries for "all sorts of functionality" with ease for native languages - Swift, C#, Python (Mac, Win, Linux). - In the end the ability to use CSS is harming user because now you don't have default OS element styling and every app is using it's own styling for things like buttons - this is very bad.

seanwilson 9y ago

> If it wasn't for Electron, Collate would be a very different application or non-existant. I think people need to look at Electron as opening the door to more possibilities. Exactly. If you're building an app yourself you'd never have the resources to make a native app for Mac, Windows and Linux. Nothing is perfect in software development. Electron is a decent tradeoff for certain projects. Regular customers aren't going to even consider disk space or memory usage unlike many vocal commenters in this community.

jedikv 9y ago

>"From what I've seen, users are more than happy to have an application that solves their need no matter what it's created in. Most people don't really think about file sizes, or the fact that Chromium is packaged with Node, they just want their problem solved without visual or performance hiccups." To be frank, most users often don't have a better performant alternative (outside of maybe a browser tab) so it seems like a redundant point.