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Some of us are. I make https://beekeeperstudio.io https://beekeeperstudio.io. I think there's a huge market need for good desktop apps, many folks prefer them
by rathboma 5y ago
Some of us are. I make https://beekeeperstudio.io https://beekeeperstudio.io.
I think there's a huge market need for good desktop apps, many folks prefer them to online tools. Bonus: It's never been easier to build a cross-platform desktop app.
I know there's a lot of hate in here for Electron, but it truly makes cross-platform desktop app development achievable for small companies and indies.
- sirjaz 5y agoKeep up the good fight! Also, have you looked at react native for Windows and Mac?
- rathboma 5y agoHey! Well I use Linux full time, so supporting Linux is a non-negotiable for me. Make the future you want to live in right? :-)
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoWhat about Flutter? I heard so many complaints before I now hesitate to look at it. But maybe these were just teething problems and things are running more smoothly now?
- rathboma 5y agoIt wasn't available when I started Beekeeper Studio, so I never tried it. I used to hate native-apps-that-are-actually-web-apps, but I'm a full convert after using VSCode, that's what encouraged me to take the leap with BKS. Electron is the market leader, so maybe Flutter will end up better, but at this point I'm skeptical.
- xdfgh1112 5y agoFlutter is great. Web support is still not all there, but if you're looking at making apps for iOS/Android/Linux/Windows/Mac and you're not worried about it looking 100% native, it's a huge timesaver.
- ghostpepper 5y agoIs an electron app really a desktop app? I suppose from the users point of view it could be, but I read the OPs post as asking about native desktop apps, ie. providing a better experience than a webapp. To answer (my interpretation of) the question, there are still plenty of good native desktop apps for MacOS. I don't have data to back this up but I wonder if Mac users are more willing to pay for native desktop apps than Windows or Linux, which makes it easier for indie devs to support themselves full time writing these niche apps.
- rathboma 5y agoI can't speak for all Electron apps, but Beekeeper Studio is a true desktop app yes. All the assets (css, html, js) are bundled in the app, nothing loads from the web, it is truly 'local', and works 100% offline. It's possible to change styles based on what OS you're running on, and there's the full suite of native APIs you can call. To weigh in on who pays for software -- I'll let you know once I've sold more copies of my paid version, my guess is that more MacOS using individuals pay for apps, but more businesses running Windows pay for bulk licenses. Maybe Peldi from Balsamiq will weigh in here.
- ceeplusplus 5y agoI think OP means native app. JS based Electron apps are noticeably less responsive and suck a lot more battery+RAM than native apps, easily a 10x difference.
- cheesysam 5y agoThanks for your work on beekeeper. I've been using it for about 12 months and in that time it's really improved.
- rathboma 5y agoThanks so much! Lots more updates coming soon :-). Got a pretty meaty one coming in the next week or two
- falcolas 5y ago> makes cross-platform desktop app development achievable Personal opinion - this has never been not achievable. It just requires making it a priority. And it's not as if creating and maintaining an Electron app is somehow free. This "not free" aspect is compounded if you care about making it fit in with the rest of the desktop environment. Which, being fair, most developers (PMs, Managers, Execs) don't, even when their customers do.
- jjice 5y agoYou're right that it's possible, and electron development isn't free, but it's significantly easier for a team of two than it is to maintain native Windows, MacOS, and Linux. One way I think of Electron is that it's fine if it's a primary app I'm using, but when it's a side thing that I have to leave open (Spotify, Slack), it can annoying. I agree that I'd rather native apps for better performance and resource usage, but I understand the developer's plight.
- criddell 5y agoThere's no developer's plight for Spotify and Slack. They both have tens of millions of clients running. They can afford to make something better and if they had any respect for their users or the planet, they would.
- datagram 5y agoI think one of the biggest problems with modern app development (web and desktop) is how much developers assume that their app is your primary app (and thus can hog resources/screen space/etc). The only apps that can ever reasonably make that assumptions imo are ones with real-time interaction, e.g. games. Anything else can and will be a side app in some scenarios.
- Kaze404 5y agoYou omitted half of that quote. OP is talking about small companies and indie developers.
- beamatronic 5y ago
- Nicksil 5y ago>I know there's a lot of hate in here for Electron, but it truly makes cross-platform desktop app development achievable for small companies and indies. So does Qt
- duped 5y agoQt is not nearly as easy to use as Electron, especially if you're a small company and need to hire front end devs for cheap. Also Qt GUIs look like garbage, but it's hard to quantify why.
- Nicksil 5y ago>Qt is not nearly as easy to use as Electron, especially if you're a small company and need to hire front end devs for cheap. Sure it is. >Also Qt GUIs look like garbage, but it's hard to quantify why. No more garbage-like than you're getting with Electron and just as style-able (with arguable superior layout engines). Qt has a number of style palettes; perhaps you're used to using applications which chose to use non-native/standard palettes.
- stnmtn 5y agoWhat are some examples of great-looking QT applications?
- smoldesu 5y agoI've written apps with GTK, Qt and Electron in the past. Of the three frameworks, Qt is easily the hardest (albeit "the best" for cross-platform native development). I'm not sure what your experience is with it, but I never once felt like it was easier than writing an Electron app.
- crocarneiro 5y agoJust wanted to thank you. I used Beekeeper for some time instead of PGAdmin and it was a very nice experience.
- rathboma 5y agoThanks for the kind words! Lots of nice quality of life improvements for Postgres coming in the next couple of weeks :-)
- korse 5y agoDoes anyone have any thoughts about DBeaver?
- drewzero1 5y agoI use it occasionally, it tends to be my app of choice when I need to modify a MySQL database directly.
- rathboma 5y agoIt's super powerful, but with that power comes complexity. I found it too overwhelming to use when building Rails apps. I really missed SequelPro, so I built Beekeeper Studio to scratch my own itch. Others had the same itch I guess!
- atentaten 5y agoI use DBeaver a lot for Postgres and Mysql. I find it to be a great tool. Not as slow as other db clients, yet is full-featured.
- hadlock 5y agoI prefer pgadmin, especially now that they dropped the hard dependency on chrome (that was added semi-recently for version 4)
- warble 5y agoI use DBeaver a lot, it's a great tool, their sales approach is mind boggling however. It took me several days to buy a license.. what the hell!
- mib32 5y agoI've been following for a while, really love the Beekeeper Studio! But I always was interested, how do you evaluate the market and your income? Would you advice to join and develop tools for the desktop? Is it your fulltime job? Does it take a lot of time? Thanks!