5 ms·

So what’s stopping them from doing that now?

by traviswt 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xkqd 5y ago
Probably familiarity with and the relative ease of Electron?
- korijn 5y ago
  This feels like the most probable explanation to me; companies hire tons of people skilled in web development, front and backend, and then suddenly desire a desktop app. Then they either don't want to recruit people who specialize in desktop apps or they don't want to retrain their web dev staff. And even if they were willing, they probably would still impose a ridiculous timeline and expect the app to be delivered. I can understand that an engineering team not familiar with desktop applications would choose Electron in such a scenario. However, in none of these decisions was the user experience a factor at all. That bothers me. "Just buy a laptop with 16GB RAM and stop complaining, get with the times", I hear the downvoters thinking. This development directly drives people towards purchasing a more powerful replacement computer. Chip shortage, electronic waste, does anyone care?
eqvinox 5y ago
"aaS"-ification of everything. If your music is streamed from some service, you're generally forced to use that service's apps. Otherwise you'd StEaL tHeIr CoNtEnT. (formatting intended to convey sarcasm.) Not really related: your German word of the day is "Raubmordkopieren". The content industry, in Germany, decided to phrase copyright violations as "Raubkopie", literally "armed robbery copy". (There are two verbs for robbery in German, "stehlen" for simple theft without force, and "rauben" for forceful theft.) Since this is pretty obviously a far stretch (how is filesharing "by force"?), the P2P scene decided to go for the hyperbole: "mord", as you might have guessed, is murder. "Raubmord" is an established word in German ("holdup murder".) "Raubmordkopie" — you get the idea.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  If you use an unofficial Discord client, you risk getting your account banned. Even banning aside, I wish there were better unofficial Discord clients. Ripcord is closed-source, lacks multi-message select, and doesn't let you search, and gtkcord3's repo is archived (and I didn't try it).
schwartzworld 5y ago
They would have to build an app for every platform they support. If you want to target all three, it's much easier to use something like electron that targets all three. You maintain feature parity and even bug parity across platforms.
- korijn 5y ago
  There are plenty of alternatives such as Qt
  - schwartzworld 5y ago
    I'm not defending the choice. Just explaining the upside. I'm pretty sure you can access slack through a browser tab if you want, so anybody who really hates electron has an easy out.

So what’s stopping them from doing that now?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xkqd 5y ago

Probably familiarity with and the relative ease of Electron?

korijn 5y ago
This feels like the most probable explanation to me; companies hire tons of people skilled in web development, front and backend, and then suddenly desire a desktop app. Then they either don't want to recruit people who specialize in desktop apps or they don't want to retrain their web dev staff. And even if they were willing, they probably would still impose a ridiculous timeline and expect the app to be delivered. I can understand that an engineering team not familiar with desktop applications would choose Electron in such a scenario. However, in none of these decisions was the user experience a factor at all. That bothers me. "Just buy a laptop with 16GB RAM and stop complaining, get with the times", I hear the downvoters thinking. This development directly drives people towards purchasing a more powerful replacement computer. Chip shortage, electronic waste, does anyone care?

eqvinox 5y ago

"aaS"-ification of everything. If your music is streamed from some service, you're generally forced to use that service's apps. Otherwise you'd StEaL tHeIr CoNtEnT. (formatting intended to convey sarcasm.) Not really related: your German word of the day is "Raubmordkopieren". The content industry, in Germany, decided to phrase copyright violations as "Raubkopie", literally "armed robbery copy". (There are two verbs for robbery in German, "stehlen" for simple theft without force, and "rauben" for forceful theft.) Since this is pretty obviously a far stretch (how is filesharing "by force"?), the P2P scene decided to go for the hyperbole: "mord", as you might have guessed, is murder. "Raubmord" is an established word in German ("holdup murder".) "Raubmordkopie" — you get the idea.

nyanpasu64 5y ago
If you use an unofficial Discord client, you risk getting your account banned. Even banning aside, I wish there were better unofficial Discord clients. Ripcord is closed-source, lacks multi-message select, and doesn't let you search, and gtkcord3's repo is archived (and I didn't try it).

schwartzworld 5y ago

They would have to build an app for every platform they support. If you want to target all three, it's much easier to use something like electron that targets all three. You maintain feature parity and even bug parity across platforms.

korijn 5y ago
There are plenty of alternatives such as Qt
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  I'm not defending the choice. Just explaining the upside. I'm pretty sure you can access slack through a browser tab if you want, so anybody who really hates electron has an easy out.