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We ended here for pure business reasons, and not as a convenience for end users. JavaScript programmers are dime a dozen comparing to Cocoa programmers. What we

We ended here for pure business reasons, and not as a convenience for end users. JavaScript programmers are dime a dozen comparing to Cocoa programmers. What we ended up with is suite of software almost no one uses on their free choice.

tolmasky 5y ago
The business decision Apple made to largely ignore Cocoa, especially any semblance of documentation, and then confuse “native developers” by giving them conflicting half-baked solutions like Catalyst and SwiftUI? I guess given the option between a closed-source half-assed framework like Catalyst that even Apple themselves can’t make reasonable apps with (see Apple News), and an open source half-assed framework like Electron where you can at least contribute a fix instead of having to wait a full year for the surprise of whether your reported issue got fixed or not, most people just preferred the latter.
542458 5y ago
“Business reasons” and “convenience for end users” are not entirely decoupled because developer time is not infinite or free. As an end user, the app that exists on my platform (Figma on windows) is better than the app that never got ported because it’s codebase is tied into a bunch of OS native stuff (Sketch). If an app costs half as much because it’s easier to hire developers who know JS compared to native devs, I’ll also be happy. If an app gets features added faster, or is less buggy, or has a better plugin interface, hey, I won’t complain. There’s nothing that says “as an end user I’ll always prefer electron” - I don’t care what it’s written in. But from my perspective there seems to be a lot of high quality electron software that may not have existed otherwise.
fauigerzigerk 5y ago
>We ended here for pure business reasons, and not as a convenience for end users. But it's users who are creating these business reasons. Many people, myself included, simply don't experience native software as universally superior as platform purists would have it. So we're not paying for it. And no you can't simply blame employers either. They may not care much about what their employees find more convenient or more beautiful, but they sure care about productivity and TCO. Resource constraints are not a capitalist conspiracy. Free software suffers from the same issues and trade-offs between implementing actual features and re-writing software for six different platforms and UI technologies. A choice free of any and all resource constraints cannot exist.
jmrm 5y ago
Also we have to consider that porting software or trying to make it work with the same characteristics and UI is pretty difficult and expensive (in time and money) compared with a web app or an Electron application.

tolmasky 5y ago

The business decision Apple made to largely ignore Cocoa, especially any semblance of documentation, and then confuse “native developers” by giving them conflicting half-baked solutions like Catalyst and SwiftUI? I guess given the option between a closed-source half-assed framework like Catalyst that even Apple themselves can’t make reasonable apps with (see Apple News), and an open source half-assed framework like Electron where you can at least contribute a fix instead of having to wait a full year for the surprise of whether your reported issue got fixed or not, most people just preferred the latter.

542458 5y ago

“Business reasons” and “convenience for end users” are not entirely decoupled because developer time is not infinite or free. As an end user, the app that exists on my platform (Figma on windows) is better than the app that never got ported because it’s codebase is tied into a bunch of OS native stuff (Sketch). If an app costs half as much because it’s easier to hire developers who know JS compared to native devs, I’ll also be happy. If an app gets features added faster, or is less buggy, or has a better plugin interface, hey, I won’t complain. There’s nothing that says “as an end user I’ll always prefer electron” - I don’t care what it’s written in. But from my perspective there seems to be a lot of high quality electron software that may not have existed otherwise.

fauigerzigerk 5y ago

>We ended here for pure business reasons, and not as a convenience for end users. But it's users who are creating these business reasons. Many people, myself included, simply don't experience native software as universally superior as platform purists would have it. So we're not paying for it. And no you can't simply blame employers either. They may not care much about what their employees find more convenient or more beautiful, but they sure care about productivity and TCO. Resource constraints are not a capitalist conspiracy. Free software suffers from the same issues and trade-offs between implementing actual features and re-writing software for six different platforms and UI technologies. A choice free of any and all resource constraints cannot exist.

jmrm 5y ago

Also we have to consider that porting software or trying to make it work with the same characteristics and UI is pretty difficult and expensive (in time and money) compared with a web app or an Electron application.