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The app is older than Electron. The people who this tool were written for would probably dislike a big, slow Electron app anyway And why Electron? Why not QT,

by tomc1985 8y ago

The app is older than Electron. The people who this tool were written for would probably dislike a big, slow Electron app anyway And why Electron? Why not QT, or Java swing, or some other language with GTK?

dylan604 8y ago
> And why Electron? Why not QT, or Java swing, or some other language with GTK? In this specific case, the app was targeted for MacOS and OS X earlier. Java really isn't a good solve on that platform. Which also makes it not a good solve for anything on the Mac platform. I have been wanting to build a UI tool for non-techies to be a front end to a collection of shell scripts that I have been using for day-to-day tasks. I have written the scripts to be a friendly as I can make them with drag-n-drop folders as inputs rather than requiring arguments to be provided. This looks like a good example for me to use as research.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Electron apps are also horrible on the Mac (and probably everywhere else too). Buggy, bloated resource hogs with nonstandard and limited UI and incredibly high input latency for simple actions. As a Mac user, when I hear “Electron app” I think “company that was too lazy/cheap to make a real Mac app.”
  - dylan604 8y ago
    Also, if Electron apps are just a packaged up webpage, could they even do things like run shell scripts locally? I'm also wanting to allow the user to browse for a file and have the full path intact instead of just the name of the file a browser would return.
    - lawnchair_larry 8y ago
      Not only that, but they have pervasive cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that are now exposing the user to remote code execution! Also, they tend to have out of date dependencies, and are vulnerable to traditional code execution exploits that were fixed in upstream chrome long prior.
  - gwilkes 8y ago
    Hmm, I don't know about this. VS Code is an Electron app and I'm not sure if it would benefit that much from being a "real" Mac app. I much prefer that is it consistent across platforms. I do prefer Terminal.app to Hyper though. I wouldn't mind if Slack had a native app but I'm not too bothered by it.
    - tomc1985 8y ago
      The VS code team has spent an inordinate amount of time optimizing their Electron usage to achieve some semblance of performance. VS Code is nice but it is still slower than Sublime, let alone Notepad++, Textmate, or Pluma/GTKedit
  - jlarocco 8y ago
    I can vouch that they're terrible on Linux, too. It's a lazy, corner cutting way to build a cross platform app, and it shows.
- alexkadis 8y ago
  If you want to build a simple UI on top of a script for Mac, I recommend Platypus: https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus The app has been around for years, is open source, and works really well.
  - rabidcondor 8y ago
    And by the same author as Sloth!
  - dylan604 8y ago
    Thanks! This sounds like it might be exactly what I'm looking for, just need to find time to dig into it.

dylan604 8y ago

> And why Electron? Why not QT, or Java swing, or some other language with GTK? In this specific case, the app was targeted for MacOS and OS X earlier. Java really isn't a good solve on that platform. Which also makes it not a good solve for anything on the Mac platform. I have been wanting to build a UI tool for non-techies to be a front end to a collection of shell scripts that I have been using for day-to-day tasks. I have written the scripts to be a friendly as I can make them with drag-n-drop folders as inputs rather than requiring arguments to be provided. This looks like a good example for me to use as research.

jacobolus 8y ago
Electron apps are also horrible on the Mac (and probably everywhere else too). Buggy, bloated resource hogs with nonstandard and limited UI and incredibly high input latency for simple actions. As a Mac user, when I hear “Electron app” I think “company that was too lazy/cheap to make a real Mac app.”
- dylan604 8y ago
  Also, if Electron apps are just a packaged up webpage, could they even do things like run shell scripts locally? I'm also wanting to allow the user to browse for a file and have the full path intact instead of just the name of the file a browser would return.
  - lawnchair_larry 8y ago
    Not only that, but they have pervasive cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that are now exposing the user to remote code execution! Also, they tend to have out of date dependencies, and are vulnerable to traditional code execution exploits that were fixed in upstream chrome long prior.
- gwilkes 8y ago
  Hmm, I don't know about this. VS Code is an Electron app and I'm not sure if it would benefit that much from being a "real" Mac app. I much prefer that is it consistent across platforms. I do prefer Terminal.app to Hyper though. I wouldn't mind if Slack had a native app but I'm not too bothered by it.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    The VS code team has spent an inordinate amount of time optimizing their Electron usage to achieve some semblance of performance. VS Code is nice but it is still slower than Sublime, let alone Notepad++, Textmate, or Pluma/GTKedit
- jlarocco 8y ago
  I can vouch that they're terrible on Linux, too. It's a lazy, corner cutting way to build a cross platform app, and it shows.
alexkadis 8y ago
If you want to build a simple UI on top of a script for Mac, I recommend Platypus: https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus The app has been around for years, is open source, and works really well.
- rabidcondor 8y ago
  And by the same author as Sloth!
- dylan604 8y ago
  Thanks! This sounds like it might be exactly what I'm looking for, just need to find time to dig into it.