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To Revive the Mac, Apple Wants to Kill Electron
- octabyte 7y agoIs electron currently still the bloated beast it was a few years ago? Has it gotten cleaner and slicker ? How are libraries shared now, if any?
- forrestthewoods 7y ago> Is electron currently still the bloated beast it was a few years ago? yes
- lagadu 7y agoYes it is. Whenever you open a common app whose interface is janky, uses a ton of memory, doesn't load all views as instantly as you expect a desktop app to and needs to frequently refresh itself you know you're using electron. Think slack and spotify, the article doesn't mention it but I'm sure Tidal is too because it behaves in exactly the same way.
- octabyte 7y agoI don’t understand how billion dollar companies can’t pony up for a few native app devs lol
- LeoNatan25 7y agoThe absurd is that lone developers (or small teams) manage to out do in quality apps from large companies. Nowadays, most software by a large company is terrible, even if native. Take a look at Apple's software going downhill, Microsoft software going downhill, etc.
- ymolodtsov 7y agoBecause it’s much faster and easier to deploy new features when you have one app for three platforms. They’d be crazy to spend resources on native apps for those.
- koffiezet 7y agoThe only program that seems to be doing rather well seems to be Visual Code. It's fast and responsive, and one of the main advantages of it using Electron is that it got a fully cross-platform plugin system almost for free. Given the importance of that application in my daily work, I don't mind it using a few hundred MB ram. I have other critical tools running that consume way more than that. But that's about the only electron app I really like to use that I use on a daily basis. Many of the other things like slack, discord, spotify, ... are more of a nuisance, and are more 'background' applications for me. Justifying blowing a Gb or 2 of ram on these is hard. I currently already use Franz (also electron) to replace all the "chat" applications, which is tolerable given that it replaces a few things, but still not a huge fan.
- LeoNatan25 7y agoVSCode is bad too. Compare it to Notepad++ or BB Edit, it's no competition. VSCode looks out of place on any platform it runs on, is slow when compared to native editors, takes up a lot of RAM, practically useless when opening large log files, etc. People keep bringing that as a shining example, but it's bad on its own right. It's just less bad than the other Electron "software".
- rmsaksida 7y agoIt's snappy compared to IDEs like Visual Studio or IntelliJ IDEA, slow compared to native editors like Sublime Text. I think it's unbeatable as a TypeScript IDE and that's what I use it for most of the time. When I need to open a large file, I use Sublime Text.
- justaaron 7y agomedium. paywalled.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoI was just thinking to revive HN I want to kill Medium.
- vezycash 7y agoTo revive something, it has to be dead first.
- octabyte 7y agoI’m out of the loop - why is medium suddenly out of favor these days
- panpanna 7y agoToo many full and half screen dialogs to get you accept this and that and login here and there.
- octabyte 7y agoOh... that annoying top bar that wants me to install their app? Oh that shit is annoying af lol
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoPeople expected it to be completely free and ad-free forever, for some reason.
- okket 7y agohttps://outline.com/z5kckU https://outline.com/z5kckU
- xenorplxx 7y ago
- CJefferson 7y agoEither I, or apple, don't get the benefit of electron. If I only want to target one OS, I already know better options they electron. What electron gets you is Linux, Windows and mac support with less work than any other platform (in my experience)
- thefounder 7y agoElectron is easier to use/develop on, is cross-platform, uses the most popular APIs/technologies(DOM, CSS, HTML). What not to like?
- lispm 7y agothe bloat, the UI look & feel, ...?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- arethuza 7y agoI have MS Teams and VS Code, both Electron apps, open and they seem perfectly OK to me - in fact I am surprised by how little memory they use.
- coldtea 7y agoThat's because Electron has conditioned you to enormous waste of memory, and cpu, bigger latencies, and so on. The "[surprising] little memory they use" is huge for what they do.
- arethuza 7y agoWell, Teams is using less memory than Skype for Business that I also have running and compared to Visual Studio and multiple browsers windows I have open they are hardly using anything. Edit: Yes, I think Electron/nodejs are "bloated" too if I look in node_modules - but once I stopped worrying about that I got over the whole "bloated" perception.
- panpanna 7y agoPeople use electron because it's (1) platform Independent and (2) based on web technologies. If i want to write apple only code, I code in swift.
- sameer_hacker 7y agoA mac only framework doesn't sound like an election killer at all considering windows still has a huge user base.
- kkarakk 7y agofurther ignoring mac in favor of an ipad framework that ALSO works on mac along with mac hardware refresh essentially ignoring heat issues(and keyboard issues) leads me to think apple is going to evolve past the mac completely. They just don't want users to use web apps on macs and lose their stranglehold on the app store. Things like flutter/react are completely going to devour the platform specific space for everything except usecases that require specific hardware(which apple is also losing because they're ignoring scientific/gaming marketshare by cold-shouldering nvidia,ML and AAA game devs in general). i think apple is trying to "hunker down" until internet speeds improve enough that everyone is using a streaming service for all the hardware intensive stuff and they can continue selling pretty thin clients like ipads/iphones/iARGlasses
- ex3ndr 7y agoI have recently tried to launch our iOS app via catalyst runtime and compare it to an electron app. Memory and CPU usage was only %10% less. I am not convinced that v8 itself have something wrong with memory usage. Same app without electron will take same amount of memory.
- LeoNatan25 7y agoIf your iOS software uses as much memory as Electron apps on PC, there is something really wrong with your software, and you should profile it to see where that memory goes.
- dmos62 7y agoAnyone with experience developing cross-platform native code, what's your take on the state of native cross-platform? Comment on GTK, qt?
- flukus 7y agoI'm partial to GTK (it's just C and doesn't need a special pre-processor) but Qt does a much better job of looking decent on non-linux computers. There's probably some other options worth considering like libUI and Tk.
- dasloop 7y agoAs long as you target desktop class apps, Qt is more than enough. For native mobile the offer is weaker (in Qt land, is QML) but possible. For web development Qt is not an option. Electron can target web/desktop/mobile but the results are far from optimal (RAM, CPU cycles... JS!).
- zerr 7y agoQt, wxWidgets, Gtk(mm) - I'll take such framework even if I want to develop for a single platform - the sane APIs and you can always fallback to '#ifdef platform' as needed (rare).
- phire 7y agoQt is ok. Not great, but serviceable. Everything else is worse.
- lmm 7y agoPeople forget that most apps start off as a dozen lines to solve someone's individual problem. Qt is nice. GTK is... ok. But to get a cross-platform build with either of them requires a couple of hours' fiddling around. The later you wait to go cross-platform, the more platform-specific assumptions creep into your code and the longer it'll take. But no-one wants to spend that couple of hours fiddling around right at the start of their project, when it's just a dozen lines to fix their own problem. With electron you write that dozen line helper utility and you're automatically cross-platform from day 1. And not just in the kind of theoretical way you get with say PyQt where your application could be made to build on another platform if you spent a couple of hours fiddling with the build; the alternate-platform binaries are just there. That's powerful.
- flukus 7y ago> Building them is also an expensive, slow job that requires a team of developers and designers — particularly if they’re building for multiple platforms, like Windows, macOS, and Linux, at the same time. That is just blatantly wrong. There's cross platform toolkits like Gtk/Qt/Swing/others that I'd say are still easier to build apps with than electron. There's RAD tools like WinForms and VB that let you drag'n'drop most of the UI if you're happy targeting a single platform. Electron is still not as good as these options were 20 years ago, the only thing it has going for it are a legion of web developers that are seemingly incapable of learning something different.
- ex3ndr 7y agoYou have to support web too. Are you going to build app in Qt for web too?
- AndriyKunitsyn 7y agoWhat? No, in general you don't.
- langitbiru 7y agoMaybe the answer is Flutter.
- SyneRyder 7y ago> There's RAD tools like WinForms and VB that let you drag'n'drop most of the UI if you're happy targeting a single platform. Even if you want cross-platform native RAD development, there's options like Xojo / REALbasic [1], at least for Windows / Mac / Linux / RaspberryPi development. I'd bet that most of the Xojo developers are single-person coding shops, and certainly don't have big teams of developers & designers behind them. Electron is definitely not the only option out there. Anecdata, but most of the people I know personally making money from single-developer cross-platform apps are using Qt, not Electron. [1] https://www.xojo.com/ https://www.xojo.com/
- chrisbolt 7y agohttps://imgur.com/a/gaNGqMQ https://imgur.com/a/gaNGqMQ 49% of the page is non-scrollable on an iPad (811 of 1668 vertical pixels). Unreadable.
- eafkuor 7y agoChrist, that's horrifying
- trishmapow2 7y agoIsn't there a reading mode? Even Chrome is rolling one out (desktop with reader mode flag set).
- Causality1 7y agoHave a look at this HN story from the other day. 2280 vertical pixels and zero article content. https://i.imgur.com/PO3z3ST.jpg https://i.imgur.com/PO3z3ST.jpg
- kgraves 7y agoEvery medium article I go to I turn on reader/distill mode. Much easier than fighting with the website
- movedx 7y agoI use "Reader View" in Firefox and everything smells of roses again.
- majkinetor 7y agoDidn't know about it. Thanks, it rocks.
- ex3ndr 7y agoComment about Jira is awful. Jira is perfect example. Because it sucks on web, but perfect on mobile. They almost convinced to come back to Jira instead of notion.
- rado 7y agoDo. It. It's embarrassing when the industry sacrifices speed and quality for the sake of dev convenience.
- rapsey 7y agoThis is a very weak argument. If it was the case catalyst would be windows as well. Then it would actually be very interesting. Solving the “apple” side of the equasion is no solution at all.
- jablan 7y ago> Its goal is to make building a native app as easy as building with Electron. 1. Building with Electron is not easy 2. Building native apps is easy (at least was the last time I checked on Windows some decades ago, I guess it's not harder now)
- t0astbread 7y agoDepends on where you come from. If you're already accustomed to the web stack you'll love Electron. If you come from a .NET background or something similar, you'll prefer native.
- imedadel 7y agoWhere do I start if I want to build a native app for Windows, in terms of language, frameworks and UI kits?
- kkarakk 7y agoDownload the Universal app SDK package in Visual Studio 2019(on windows 10 post anniversary update only afaik) and you're off. Language can be c# or js,framework is .net framework and UI is modernized XAML or html/cordova however the js/html/cordova support is a second class citizen and you'll have an easier time just using c#/XAML
- apersona 7y agoIt's the easiest way to get all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) if you're already comfortable with web dev.
- nahtnam 7y agoI don't think this is the right solution. Something like React Native where the core logic is shared but the UI/Views can be tailored to each environment is ideal. I believe Microsoft released some React Native stuff for desktop and hopefully, there is some work going on for MacOS.
- xenorplxx 7y agoYea, Microsoft seems to maintain react-native windows and they've officially announced their support.
- saagarjha 7y agoThe author is just plain wrong multiple times: > Electron represents something of an existential crisis for Apple. If developers can build with web-based frameworks, they’re less likely to use Apple’s tools, services, and ultimately, its App Store. Most Mac apps are distributed outside of the Mac App Store. > To demo such an exciting framework, you’d expect big names like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, which could theoretically bring off-line video playback to the Mac for the first time Nobody seems to have really been clamoring for native apps for these… > developers like Netflix, which need to build for other platforms anyway, will keep using Electron for other apps Yeah, no. Netflix makes “native” apps for a mind-boggling number of platforms, including set-top boxes and game consoles. > A better example of this idea can be found in Chromebooks, where Google allows almost any Android app to be used without modification. Want to run Instagram or stream with Spotify’s mobile app? It works as you’d expect, with all of the benefits from the mobile app in tow. No, it doesn’t: have you tried to scroll in one of those apps? That’s right, most of the time you have to drag your cursor across the screen. > If you’re a company like Slack, it’s cheaper and easier for you to target every desktop platform with Electron No, because Slack already has an iPad app.
- suvelx 7y ago> yeah, no. Netflix makes “native” apps for a mind-boggling number of platforms, including set-top boxes and game consoles. I think all of the STB platforms (at least in the UK) are HTML & JS now. I think they used to be flash.
- armitron 7y agoHe's not plain wrong. Your replies are totally off the mark. > Most Mac apps are distributed outside of the Mac App Store. How does that make the author's statement wrong? > Nobody seems to have really been clamoring for native apps for these… "Nobody seems". Subjective. Also sounds wrong to me since it goes against my personal experience. > Yeah, no. Netflix makes “native” apps for a mind-boggling number of platforms, including set-top boxes and game consoles. How does that make the author's statement wrong? > No, it doesn’t: have you tried to scroll in one of those apps? That’s right, most of the time you have to drag your cursor across the screen. Not my experience. > No, because Slack already has an iPad app. Irrelevant. How does that make the author's statement wrong?
- stunt 7y agoBut how Apple building Catalyst is going to killing Electron? Electron is cross-platform. So, for many companies, it will be still the first choice unless they are only building for Apple only ecosystem. You can't expect Apple to not invest on the tooling for its own platform even if cross-platform solutions are great.
- Teknoman117 7y agoMaybe I wouldn’t hate electron as much as I do if they’d get around to fixing https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/9413 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/9413. Run dual 4K monitors on a Linux box on both nvidia and AMD GPU and all my electron apps turn into a flickery, randomly not rendering mess. Currently running what I can in Firefox, but VS Code still needs to me on my desktop and is still a mess unless I disable GPU acceleration. Two years guys, please...
- fopen64 7y agoThe problem is, Macs are too expensive and underpowered these days. More important than developers are users. Right now the Mac is sort of a tax levied on iOS developers
- acqq 7y agoEven if it appears as a technical article, it's actually fake news one. Technically, the facts contradict the claims from the title and the article. I flag seldom, but this one really deserves it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bluesign 7y agoProject Catalyst has no competition with Electron. It is a smart move from Apple to fill the void in Mac App Store with minimum cost to developers.
- thefounder 7y agoI doubt any Electron user will jump the Catalyst wagon. Catalyst is not portable/is Mac only. Electron is easier to use/uses well known APIs/tech stack
- ymolodtsov 7y agoIt might make sense for any company that already has an iPad app. They can still use Electron for Windows/Linux.
- coldtea 7y agoSuch a hack of an article...
- xenorplxx 7y agoDoesn't project Catalyst mean that we'd be able to build react-native iOS apps on macOS? :D That would be great, cause with MS support you can build react-native apps on Windows and even Xbox already, just Linux is still out of reach.
- jonbeebe 7y agoThis is a very good point that I hadn't thought of, that is, is react-native adds support for it. I imagine Catalyst would make things easier though.
- xenorplxx 7y agoFrom what I understand (although I didn't do much research) all you have to do is to use a new enough version of Xcode and that's it, so React Native doesn't really have to add any support. Ultimately, you build native apps anyway, all JS things are hidden inside.
- xenorplxx 7y agoI did more research and it seems that they indeed have to add some kind of support.