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That 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

by jeswin 5y ago

That 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 ago
We 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 ago
  There are cross-platform toolkits that render using native controls. Bootstrap+jQuery and Win32 are not the only two possible options.
  - creshal 5y ago
    GTK, 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 ago
https://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 ago
  No linux. Where 25% of .net developers are. Its not going to fly.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    25% of .NET developers are on Linux!? Got an actual statistic to back that up? I would estimate more like 0.25%...
    - smackeyacky 5y ago
      I 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Figma is written in C++. I guess all web-devs should learn C++ ?

by jeswin 5y ago

creshal 5y ago

We 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 ago
There are cross-platform toolkits that render using native controls. Bootstrap+jQuery and Win32 are not the only two possible options.
- creshal 5y ago
  GTK, 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 ago

https://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 ago
No linux. Where 25% of .net developers are. Its not going to fly.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  25% of .NET developers are on Linux!? Got an actual statistic to back that up? I would estimate more like 0.25%...
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    I 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 ago

The 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 ago
Figma is written in C++. I guess all web-devs should learn C++ ?