3 ms·
> You can spend all day asking irrelevant questions We're discussing how dev time is best spent in service to the end user (and environment.) It's absolutely
by MaulingMonkey 8y ago
> You can spend all day asking irrelevant questions
We're discussing how dev time is best spent in service to the end user (and environment.) It's absolutely relevant.
> The point is that "developer time is more expensive than hardware" is not a valid argument from the user's perspective. As you can see from the complaints here, people already find the color picker less attractive because it uses wasteful Electron. It's not a good product, regardless of how cheap it was for the developer to produce and will be less successful as a result.
Things the end user does care about include features, price, and the actual existence of the end product, all things I see frequently sacrificed by the "maximum efficiency at any cost" crowd, because they're misallocating dev time. They aren't even optimizing the actual efficiency bottlenecks half the time, just micro-optimizing some unimportant edge case.
You're right that the discussion doesn't matter to the end user, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong decision. As you can also see from the posts here, not everyone is convinced it's a big deal either. People are constructing strawman arguments "these devs and their 4k monitors and 32GB+ machines", but I'm using electron apps from an underpowered 8GB laptop just fine.
Yes, if you're traveling and downloading it over a mobile connection, it'll take a hit. Yes, I'm sure you can find a worse laptop than mine, and if you search hard enough you'll even find one where the fact that it's an electron app will be a problem. Yes, you can spend more resources to make a better app - that's always true, the question is where diminishing returns make that no longer cost effective. Yes, if there's no outlets nearby, it won't stretch battery life as far.
But no, I'm not convinced that calling it "not a good product" as a result of being an electron app is quite right either. Not the best product it possibly could be, but no product is.
> You don't need justification for developing something that isn't good because of wrong or selfish priorities,
Nor am I convinced there are wrong or selfish priorities in using electron. What, exactly, is wrong or selfish with saving dev time to work on something more important to the end user? Even if that's another product entirely?
- lazyjones 8y ago> What, exactly, is wrong or selfish with saving dev time to work on something more important to the end user? Even if that's another product entirely? It's simply completely irrelevant what the developer might or might not be working on also in your imagination, when we are judging the product based on its technical merits. Inventing some extremely important better use of the developer's time to justify inflicting a wasteful 55MB download on the world, is a strawman argument of the same quality you complained about.
- MaulingMonkey 8y agoI deal with programs that crash OOM on 32GB+ machines. I deal with products that actually have a million users, with gigabytes of download. I don't need to invent anything that the developer could be working on, existing problems to work on are abundant. And I don't even work on anything important! But more important than this color picker? I'm pretty sure you could think of concrete examples of that too, without resorting to imagining anything. And if we're limiting the discussion to just the technical merits of a product, I'm not sure why you started discussing developer time and expense at all. You're the one who brought up "dev time vs millions of users hardware", and I'm just pointing out that it's perhaps more realistic to view this as "dev time" vs "thousands of users hardware" in this particular case, and that there's a lot of mildly important things the developer could work on instead.