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Web still has by far the best developer experience + cross platform stability, not to mention the lowest barrier to entry. I would be really interested to see w
by hresvelgr 5y ago
Web still has by far the best developer experience + cross platform stability, not to mention the lowest barrier to entry. I would be really interested to see what happens with Tauri[1] as that looks like a more promising alternative to Electron.
I do want to see a return to native apps but there are no worthwhile incentives to do so outside of "our customers demanded a native app."
[1] https://tauri.studio/en/ https://tauri.studio/en/
- smackeyacky 5y agoIt doesn't help that for the major consumer platform (Windows), Microsoft can't make their mind up about how to replace Win32 or WinForms. It seems like every other week there is some new framework announced, so even if you have a need to make a native app, choosing how to do it has become near impossible. Is it .NET Maui? Should I try Electronize? or take a huge punt on Avalonia? It's easier just to wrap up a web app and hand it over. Sure, that is kicking the can down the road a bit, but until Microsoft can manage to provide something other than vague, half finished plans we're all in limbo.
- jeswin 5y agoThat train left long back; nobody wants a Windows-only app when half the management are using Macs. Unless of course you're taking about pro apps like AutoCad or Photoshop; but they have never been electron and unlikely to ever be.
- creshal 5y agoWe have plenty of Windows-only customers. We're still giving them wrapped web apps when they ask for desktop applications. Because even if the customer is all-Windows, developers sure aren't (unless you're a C#-exclusive sweatshop, maybe?), and stuff like Bootstrap+jQuery is more stable than Windows GUI toolkits these days. Lower development costs and lower ongoing maintenance costs, win-win.
- selfhoster11 5y agoThere are cross-platform toolkits that render using native controls. Bootstrap+jQuery and Win32 are not the only two possible options.
- creshal 5y agoGTK, which we can't use easily due to licensing headaches and deprecates useful widgets faster than we can try to use them, or Qt, which we can't use due easily to licensing headaches and with QtQuick is just web apps in more complicated, or smaller frameworks, which already looked terrible when they were new? And outside a hard, but small core of Mac users, native controls also aren't a selling point to end users. They're harder to work with, more difficult to style, to no advantage to an end user who more often than not couldn't even tell you what the native controls of Windows are. (And I suspect most Microsoft employees can't either, if Windows 10/11 is any indication.)
- Paradigma11 5y agohttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) is a cross-platform framework for creating native mobile and desktop apps with C# and XAML. Using .NET MAUI, you can develop apps that can run on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows from a single shared code-base.
- smackeyacky 5y agoNo linux. Where 25% of .net developers are. Its not going to fly.
- jiggawatts 5y ago25% of .NET developers are on Linux!? Got an actual statistic to back that up? I would estimate more like 0.25%...
- smackeyacky 5y agoI thought I did but I misread one of the graphs on the Stack Overflow 2021 survey. So no. I use Debian as my daily driver for .NET core and was looking to see how many other developers had dropped Visual Studio for VSCode, but the graph was not how many had switched, but how many want to. My mistake. I still think ignoring linux for gui apps will hurt microsoft, we all see the success of VSCode and want to build universal apps like that for our clients too.
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoThe app that kills Photoshop will run on Electron. Figma has 100% convinced me of this, if you can make an app where the UI remains responsive and fluid like Figma and graphics heavy lifting is done in a way that doesn’t choke the UI I think you’ll pretty much eat their lunch like Figma did to Sketch, Illustrator and XD. You have to remember that Photoshop is pretty poorly optimized for modern hardware, a ton of it is single core constrained and they just haven’t cared about regressions, on Windows at least the whole app chokes for a second every time you drag the window around, it’s laughable.
- lenkite 5y agoFigma is written in C++. I guess all web-devs should learn C++ ?
- ehnto 5y agoI have seen this indecision as a death knell on a few projects. You really just have to pick something, especially if you stop developing the soon to be deprecated tooling. If it takes you two years to pick a new method, then all your developer community has to sit on their laurels. They can't invest in the old platform, they can't invest in novel tooling of their own, and they can't build with the new thing because you haven't chosen it yet.
- smackeyacky 5y agoI honestly feel like this is it for native Windows apps. It's over. GTK+ and Wayland will be more supportable in the future if WSLg gets pushed out far enough.
- MattGaiser 5y agoFor some platforms the official way to do things now is to make it a web app. Consider Microsoft Word Add Ins. The official way to do them now is with JS, React or Angular.
- jamil7 5y agoHa, and on the mac side we now have AppKit, SwiftUI and Catalyst and any combination of those you feel like.
- creshal 5y agoThe big difference is that all three of them are still fully supported, and continue to receive updates. On Windows, 90% of UI toolkits are deprecated with no support, no bug fixes, nor migration guides.
- jamil7 5y agoThat's fair. The fact that updates and fixes are shipped with OS versions makes it less useful (for us at least). People just don't upgrade their desktops like they do their phones.
- xvector 5y ago> I do want to see a return to native apps but there are no worthwhile incentives to do so outside of "our customers demanded a native app." Every native app I have ever used has been many times snappier than its Electron/Web equivalent. Think on why customers demand native apps.
- MattGaiser 5y agoBut are you willing to pay 2x for that extra snappiness?
- tehjoker 5y agoDepends on how bad it is and how important snappiness is. Apps that aren't snappy cause all kinds of cognitive problems with attention.
- Existenceblinks 5y agoThey will ask for Open Source alternatives, we have seen this for more than a decade. I only saw a few comments that say "you should get rid of free tier" per year. $5 -> this looks cheap, probably poor quality $49 -> this is quite too much $99 -> are you kidding me
- tcptomato 5y agoSo you started writing crappy apps because it was easier for you and now you want to be paid double to fix your shit?
- MattGaiser 5y agoQuality is generally more expensive, particularly the finely tuned kind.
- jeswin 5y agoHow can you say that customers are demanding native apps when only a minuscule number of users can tell if an app is native or not? Most are not even familiar with the term native; desktop installed app (of all types) vs browser app at best.
- vbezhenar 5y ago> our customers demanded a native app Isn't customer demands are the main incentive for any developer?
- MattGaiser 5y agoIt is not enough that customers demand. Customers also need to be willing to quit the product over it.
- kongin 5y ago> Web still has by far the best developer experience + cross platform stability, not to mention the lowest barrier to entry. I would be really interested to see what happens with Tauri[1] as that looks like a more promising alternative to Electron. Compared to what? C code I wrote in the 90s in middle school still compiles. JS code I wrote two weeks ago probably doesn't because the mountain of dependencies has shifted somewhere.
- galaxyLogic 5y agoCommand-line C-application is "simple". But if you want to give access to your centrally managed (and updated) app to anybody in the world who has browser and internet, it gets more complicated. It gets complicated because you have to program both the client and the server and make sure it works on multiple browsers including cell-phones. So even though basic command-line C-apps are great in terms of maintainability they also typically do less than modern web-apps.
- galaxyLogic 5y agoJavaScript is the lingua franca of the web. Therefore Node.js is a great platform for web-apps. There is also DENO which allows you to compile your JavaScript. For Node.js there is something similar in terms of Vercel/Pkg. There are benefits to using the same language for both the front-end and back-end.
- moksly 5y ago> I do want to see a return to native apps but there are no worthwhile incentives to do so outside of "our customers demanded a native app." I work in the public sector of Denmark, which has always had native Windows apps for most of our systems. The past few years of suppliers moving to web based solutions have been such a blessing. Out of the around 300 it-systems we operate, the ones running in a browser are build on a web-front of some sort, electron, included are by far the favoured experience among our 10.000 users. We’ve run a benchmark on our major systems for the past decade, and the only ones to break a 8/10 rating among 500+ users are based on angular, react, electron or vue. One of our old documenting systems has a Windows application and is also moving to a web-client. The old application scored a 1.2/10 the web client scored a 8.5/10. Covid had a massive impact on this, as the native client worked horribly over a DNS, but it never scored a rating over 5/10. You can certainly put up the argument that Danish development houses should get better at building native applications, and that’s a fair point. Reality is that they aren’t, however, so the fact that these same developers are also building the new and well received web-based UIs is a good way to show how the impact goes far beyond developer experience. I think Microsoft is the only company that has continually scored well on native applications that see massive usage, because the office package has always been popular. But isn’t much of the modern office UI build with react?