5 ms·

Quick. Hide the evidence so the ATP purists can still insist on ideological purity and in the one true belief that the only way to write Mac Applications is to

Quick. Hide the evidence so the ATP purists can still insist on ideological purity and in the one true belief that the only way to write Mac Applications is to do everything in Swift or Objective-C. After all, If Apple does it....

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Nothing wrong with it per se. But the developers choosing tech like Electron usually do it because it's low-effort cross-platform. With the emphasis on low-effort. It means they're not really willing to put in the work to make it run well. They just want to cobble something together and get it out there. There's really well-performing Electron apps, like VS Code. But the very same company also produces extreme turds, like MS Teams. This app is extremely unresponsive, takes about 30 seconds to sometimes even a minute to start up on a clean M1 Mac, and often crashes or just hangs. It's really horrible. And unfortunately the app I need the most for work. These are the apps that give these cross-platform web technologies a bad name. I understand why now that I have to struggle with this crap every day. With slack I just minded the UI not really fitting in but it performed just fine so I didn't hate the tech so much.
int_19h 5y ago
Note all the comments here about how that part of the UI is broken in so many ways.
olliej 5y ago
It is using webview to display some content in an app that is native. That's been common practice in many Mac applications for a decade. WebKit exposes native NSView subclasses to make embedding them trivial enough that for some content they are /better/. Heavily formatted content? Write your own layout engine, or just use html? The problem with electron apps is that they are entirely a single webview, that poorly implements the vast majority of standard platform affordances (if you read the other comments, you see a lot of people complaining about this specific part of System Preferences). Add to that these applications using absolutely astounding amounts of ram, huge downloads because you're essentially downloading a full copy of chrome for each app, they all have terrible launch times (because there's each is loading its own copy of chrome), the bad and laggy accessibility features, etc and the reason people dislike them becomes fairly clear. I get that there's very little standard UI or inter app interaction on linux and windows, but historically that has not been the case on Mac - the increasing prevalence of low quality electron apps is making that less reliable. The only electron app that is actually a good app is VSCode, and even that is always frustrating to use due to a bunch of basic platform behavior that they at best get wrong, but more often just don't even attempt.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Nothing wrong with it per se. But the developers choosing tech like Electron usually do it because it's low-effort cross-platform. With the emphasis on low-effort. It means they're not really willing to put in the work to make it run well. They just want to cobble something together and get it out there. There's really well-performing Electron apps, like VS Code. But the very same company also produces extreme turds, like MS Teams. This app is extremely unresponsive, takes about 30 seconds to sometimes even a minute to start up on a clean M1 Mac, and often crashes or just hangs. It's really horrible. And unfortunately the app I need the most for work. These are the apps that give these cross-platform web technologies a bad name. I understand why now that I have to struggle with this crap every day. With slack I just minded the UI not really fitting in but it performed just fine so I didn't hate the tech so much.

int_19h 5y ago

Note all the comments here about how that part of the UI is broken in so many ways.

olliej 5y ago

It is using webview to display some content in an app that is native. That's been common practice in many Mac applications for a decade. WebKit exposes native NSView subclasses to make embedding them trivial enough that for some content they are /better/. Heavily formatted content? Write your own layout engine, or just use html? The problem with electron apps is that they are entirely a single webview, that poorly implements the vast majority of standard platform affordances (if you read the other comments, you see a lot of people complaining about this specific part of System Preferences). Add to that these applications using absolutely astounding amounts of ram, huge downloads because you're essentially downloading a full copy of chrome for each app, they all have terrible launch times (because there's each is loading its own copy of chrome), the bad and laggy accessibility features, etc and the reason people dislike them becomes fairly clear. I get that there's very little standard UI or inter app interaction on linux and windows, but historically that has not been the case on Mac - the increasing prevalence of low quality electron apps is making that less reliable. The only electron app that is actually a good app is VSCode, and even that is always frustrating to use due to a bunch of basic platform behavior that they at best get wrong, but more often just don't even attempt.