7 ms·

Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately. Look and feel may not be as consistent as the ideal but it generally never was in the first p

Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately. Look and feel may not be as consistent as the ideal but it generally never was in the first place, even among native Cocoa apps. The web has won on desktop.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately Uh, I'm going to hard disagree on that. They take longer to open, they're slower to use, they take up more battery, and they don't behave in a consistent way with the rest of the OS.
- sdegutis 7y ago
  * I’m practically never so productive that I’m counting seconds for an app to open. * VS Code is just as quick to use as Xcode, actually more responsive in many actions, demonstrating effectively that it’s the algorithm which must change for a serious speed up * MBP batteries are laughable in the first place and they’re basically portable desktops that need to stay plugged in all the time * The rest of the OS hasn’t behaved consistently with itself the whole time I’ve been using it, just like every other OS I’ve used for the past 25 years; consistency was a pipe dream
  - WoodenChair 7y ago
    > * MBP batteries are laughable in the first place and they’re basically portable desktops that need to stay plugged in all the time Probably because you’re using so many electron apps. This is not the case in lab testing by MacWorld, etc.
    - sdegutis 7y ago
      More likely the 7 years straight of full time development I've done on this laptop, constantly running compilers and image editors and browsers. I could complain about those too but in the end, laptop batteries have to support the software that exists, not the software in a hypothetical ideal world.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        My Mac (just over three years old) reliably gives me 7+ hours off a full charge if I’m not constantly compiling anything; just reading mail and Hacker News can easily give 10+ hours. I very actively ensure that Electron is never running on my Mac.
        Klonoar 7y ago
        I'll second this opinion - when I don't have Chrome running, my 2015 MBP runs forever.
      - read_if_gay_ 7y ago
        If the thing is 7 (!) years old it’s no wonder the battery is done. That is not an issue with Mac batteries.
  - millstone 7y ago
    I mean VSCode is the best Electron app ever made and it still kind of sucks. The median is miles underground. Consistency is a sliding scale but Electron is a whole new (lower) level. Extremely basic interactions like "the menu bar highlights to acknowledge key equivalents" are missing.
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    Disagree on all points... "Counting seconds" may mean little to you but by proxy you can look at conversion statistics for web stores vs response time and see a pretty clear correlation VSCode's 'performance' is the result of an obscene amount of tuning the base framework, far more than most applications would need. Most other Electron apps do not see anywhere near this level of optimization (and they desperately need it). MBP batteries on a new machine are respectable. Like all li-ion batteries they decay with use Mac OS apps behave very consistently when they are native. True, Apple's user interface guidelines allow for pretty wide latitude in some areas (like skeumorphism) but all the basic OS/interaction contracts are intact. One can expect menus to behave the same way, file open/save dialogs to behave the same way, and so on.
    - sdegutis 7y ago
      First of all Apple does not follow its HIG in many ways. But even aside from that, the HIG itself changes every few years, sometimes drastically such as the iOS 7 departure. And it takes many apps time to catch up. One example is Apple's own new Mac App Store which doesn't even allow selecting or copying text in app descriptions last I checked.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        The Mac App Store is a fairly well known atrocity which might as well be a Catalyst app for how bad and out-of-place it is.
      - leadingthenet 7y ago
        Apple has definitely been shitting the bed on UI in the past few macOS releases.
      - tomc1985 7y ago
        The ability to copy text from UI labels was never part of the contract. Generally when that happens it was because the label control was some kind of textbox with most of the visual features disbled
        7y ago
- _bxg1 7y ago
  In my experience, purely from a UX perspective (both visuals and responsiveness), a hand-crafted macOS app tends to be moderately better than an Electron app, but an Electron app is usually vastly better than a shoddy or cross-compiled native app.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    In user interface, sure. Performance-wise Electron usually loses even to things like GTK.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      Every GTK app I've ever used that didn't come with the OS (granted, I've never actually paid for one) is, compared to most electron apps, a) ugly/buggy, and b) feature-anemic, because it's so much less easy to add features to it. And as a user, I've never noticed a performance difference. I know Electron uses more memory and such, but it just doesn't impact actual usage in my experience. Whereas things not getting implemented because of developer friction absolutely does.
  - leadingthenet 7y ago
    A well-crafted, organic, gluten-free macOS app is generally the best UI and UX experience on any platform, by a mile. Apps that come to mind are Things by Cultured Code and (the as of yet unreleased to the public) Nova editor by Panic. No Electron app has ever even come close for me, certainly not VSCode that everyone seems to love so much. Then there's performance...
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      Agree with the first part. But I would say the Slack UX, from a visual and performance perspective (not necessarily intuitiveness), is as good as nearly any native Mac app I've ever used. VSCode, from a visual and performance perspective, is better than any native Windows app I've ever used, and also as good as many native Mac apps. I know people like to gripe about the memory usage and disk space usage of Electron apps, which, fine. But it's a fairly academic complaint. Those things don't honestly affect my experience as a user. The only time an Electron app has ever felt sluggish to me was Atom, fully loaded with plugins (~3 years ago), and I honestly suspect that had more to do with its naive and non-cooperative plugin architecture than with Electron itself.
- arvinsim 7y ago
  I think he meant the developer, not the user experience is better.
  - sdegutis 7y ago
    Really I was just thinking of VS Code and a vague memory of some other Electron apps I've used in the past, excepting one in particular which I will not name. But VS Code is just great.
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      VS Code is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. :) It's kind of frustrating that there seem to be so few Electron apps that live up to its standard.
      - leadingthenet 7y ago
        And frankly, on macOS, VSCode isn't even THAT great. The UI certainly doesn't follow platform conventions, the scrolling is janky, and it just feels out of place. Additionally, I have yet to encounter a single native Cocoa app that has such a strong effect on battery life.
  - nottorp 7y ago
    When the developer doesn't have experience with anything but JavaScript...
burntoutfire 7y ago
The fact that Electron apps try to always fit everything into one window is an antipattern for many kinds of applications. Just try using MS Teams and you'll find yourself constantly switching between different modes (a call mode and a chatroom mode for example), while in Skype for Business (which was admitedly terrible in many other ways) they were just two separate windows.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately Uh, I'm going to hard disagree on that. They take longer to open, they're slower to use, they take up more battery, and they don't behave in a consistent way with the rest of the OS.

sdegutis 7y ago
* I’m practically never so productive that I’m counting seconds for an app to open. * VS Code is just as quick to use as Xcode, actually more responsive in many actions, demonstrating effectively that it’s the algorithm which must change for a serious speed up * MBP batteries are laughable in the first place and they’re basically portable desktops that need to stay plugged in all the time * The rest of the OS hasn’t behaved consistently with itself the whole time I’ve been using it, just like every other OS I’ve used for the past 25 years; consistency was a pipe dream
- WoodenChair 7y ago
  > * MBP batteries are laughable in the first place and they’re basically portable desktops that need to stay plugged in all the time Probably because you’re using so many electron apps. This is not the case in lab testing by MacWorld, etc.
  - sdegutis 7y ago
    More likely the 7 years straight of full time development I've done on this laptop, constantly running compilers and image editors and browsers. I could complain about those too but in the end, laptop batteries have to support the software that exists, not the software in a hypothetical ideal world.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      My Mac (just over three years old) reliably gives me 7+ hours off a full charge if I’m not constantly compiling anything; just reading mail and Hacker News can easily give 10+ hours. I very actively ensure that Electron is never running on my Mac.
      - Klonoar 7y ago
        I'll second this opinion - when I don't have Chrome running, my 2015 MBP runs forever.
    - read_if_gay_ 7y ago
      If the thing is 7 (!) years old it’s no wonder the battery is done. That is not an issue with Mac batteries.
- millstone 7y ago
  I mean VSCode is the best Electron app ever made and it still kind of sucks. The median is miles underground. Consistency is a sliding scale but Electron is a whole new (lower) level. Extremely basic interactions like "the menu bar highlights to acknowledge key equivalents" are missing.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Disagree on all points... "Counting seconds" may mean little to you but by proxy you can look at conversion statistics for web stores vs response time and see a pretty clear correlation VSCode's 'performance' is the result of an obscene amount of tuning the base framework, far more than most applications would need. Most other Electron apps do not see anywhere near this level of optimization (and they desperately need it). MBP batteries on a new machine are respectable. Like all li-ion batteries they decay with use Mac OS apps behave very consistently when they are native. True, Apple's user interface guidelines allow for pretty wide latitude in some areas (like skeumorphism) but all the basic OS/interaction contracts are intact. One can expect menus to behave the same way, file open/save dialogs to behave the same way, and so on.
  - sdegutis 7y ago
    First of all Apple does not follow its HIG in many ways. But even aside from that, the HIG itself changes every few years, sometimes drastically such as the iOS 7 departure. And it takes many apps time to catch up. One example is Apple's own new Mac App Store which doesn't even allow selecting or copying text in app descriptions last I checked.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      The Mac App Store is a fairly well known atrocity which might as well be a Catalyst app for how bad and out-of-place it is.
    - leadingthenet 7y ago
      Apple has definitely been shitting the bed on UI in the past few macOS releases.
    - tomc1985 7y ago
      The ability to copy text from UI labels was never part of the contract. Generally when that happens it was because the label control was some kind of textbox with most of the visual features disbled
      - 7y ago
_bxg1 7y ago
In my experience, purely from a UX perspective (both visuals and responsiveness), a hand-crafted macOS app tends to be moderately better than an Electron app, but an Electron app is usually vastly better than a shoddy or cross-compiled native app.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  In user interface, sure. Performance-wise Electron usually loses even to things like GTK.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Every GTK app I've ever used that didn't come with the OS (granted, I've never actually paid for one) is, compared to most electron apps, a) ugly/buggy, and b) feature-anemic, because it's so much less easy to add features to it. And as a user, I've never noticed a performance difference. I know Electron uses more memory and such, but it just doesn't impact actual usage in my experience. Whereas things not getting implemented because of developer friction absolutely does.
- leadingthenet 7y ago
  A well-crafted, organic, gluten-free macOS app is generally the best UI and UX experience on any platform, by a mile. Apps that come to mind are Things by Cultured Code and (the as of yet unreleased to the public) Nova editor by Panic. No Electron app has ever even come close for me, certainly not VSCode that everyone seems to love so much. Then there's performance...
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Agree with the first part. But I would say the Slack UX, from a visual and performance perspective (not necessarily intuitiveness), is as good as nearly any native Mac app I've ever used. VSCode, from a visual and performance perspective, is better than any native Windows app I've ever used, and also as good as many native Mac apps. I know people like to gripe about the memory usage and disk space usage of Electron apps, which, fine. But it's a fairly academic complaint. Those things don't honestly affect my experience as a user. The only time an Electron app has ever felt sluggish to me was Atom, fully loaded with plugins (~3 years ago), and I honestly suspect that had more to do with its naive and non-cooperative plugin architecture than with Electron itself.
arvinsim 7y ago
I think he meant the developer, not the user experience is better.
- sdegutis 7y ago
  Really I was just thinking of VS Code and a vague memory of some other Electron apps I've used in the past, excepting one in particular which I will not name. But VS Code is just great.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    VS Code is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. :) It's kind of frustrating that there seem to be so few Electron apps that live up to its standard.
    - leadingthenet 7y ago
      And frankly, on macOS, VSCode isn't even THAT great. The UI certainly doesn't follow platform conventions, the scrolling is janky, and it just feels out of place. Additionally, I have yet to encounter a single native Cocoa app that has such a strong effect on battery life.
- nottorp 7y ago
  When the developer doesn't have experience with anything but JavaScript...

burntoutfire 7y ago

The fact that Electron apps try to always fit everything into one window is an antipattern for many kinds of applications. Just try using MS Teams and you'll find yourself constantly switching between different modes (a call mode and a chatroom mode for example), while in Skype for Business (which was admitedly terrible in many other ways) they were just two separate windows.