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Putting aside the many resource problems with Electron apps, can you achieve the level of user experience that the Electron folks do? I see Electron devs being

Putting aside the many resource problems with Electron apps, can you achieve the level of user experience that the Electron folks do? I see Electron devs being asked to match the slickness of an existing website with similar delivery time and productivity. You don't seem to be able to get close to that with native APIs, API frameworks, or higher-level tools without a lot of work. When you remove these UI and delivery requirements then almost all other frameworks seem to have a fighting chance.

pfranz 8y ago
My argument is that the UI requirements are almost always nonsense. I hate launching a new app and trying to figure out a new interaction model or fighting a themes/fonts that fight my needs (font sizes, contrasting colors, etc). Basic stuff is often broken and there's a long tail, if ever, for them to get fixed. They're also the best candidates to break during an OS or other library update. The whole reason OSes give you reusable components is so its easy to implement the conventions users are familiar with. Those are the things that are supposed to be fast and easy. This likely violates the delivery timelines, but Maya, Nuke, and Houdini are all professional, heavily customized apps that were written in their own UI toolkits but were ported years ago to Qt and are cross platform.
jacobolus 8y ago
My experience is that every Electron app I’ve ever tried has a terrible “user experience” compared to average competently made native Mac apps. Their core UI widgets are non-standard for the platform and are full of bugs and inconsistencies. Latency is through the roof on all sorts of common interactions. They don’t integrate well with standard expected OS features/services. They burn massive amounts of system resources. From my perspective as a user, Electron apps are for companies who don’t really care much about quality and are too cheap and lazy to write native apps. YMMV.
- userbinator 8y ago
  Electron is basically "write a web app, package it with a browser, and call it a desktop app." Ironically, Microsoft was one of the early adopters of the idea of "web technologies for desktop apps": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
- semireg 8y ago
  I’m a company of one and I care about quality. I’ve shipped native apps for Mac, iOS and Android. About a year ago I began work on Label LIVE, an Electron app to interface with thermal label printers. It’s not perfect but it fills a niche. It wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Electron. Check out the video or download and give it a try. http://label.live http://label.live
pjmlp 8y ago
Easily with XAML/QML.

pfranz 8y ago

My argument is that the UI requirements are almost always nonsense. I hate launching a new app and trying to figure out a new interaction model or fighting a themes/fonts that fight my needs (font sizes, contrasting colors, etc). Basic stuff is often broken and there's a long tail, if ever, for them to get fixed. They're also the best candidates to break during an OS or other library update. The whole reason OSes give you reusable components is so its easy to implement the conventions users are familiar with. Those are the things that are supposed to be fast and easy. This likely violates the delivery timelines, but Maya, Nuke, and Houdini are all professional, heavily customized apps that were written in their own UI toolkits but were ported years ago to Qt and are cross platform.

jacobolus 8y ago

My experience is that every Electron app I’ve ever tried has a terrible “user experience” compared to average competently made native Mac apps. Their core UI widgets are non-standard for the platform and are full of bugs and inconsistencies. Latency is through the roof on all sorts of common interactions. They don’t integrate well with standard expected OS features/services. They burn massive amounts of system resources. From my perspective as a user, Electron apps are for companies who don’t really care much about quality and are too cheap and lazy to write native apps. YMMV.

userbinator 8y ago
Electron is basically "write a web app, package it with a browser, and call it a desktop app." Ironically, Microsoft was one of the early adopters of the idea of "web technologies for desktop apps": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
semireg 8y ago
I’m a company of one and I care about quality. I’ve shipped native apps for Mac, iOS and Android. About a year ago I began work on Label LIVE, an Electron app to interface with thermal label printers. It’s not perfect but it fills a niche. It wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Electron. Check out the video or download and give it a try. http://label.live http://label.live

pjmlp 8y ago

Easily with XAML/QML.