4 ms·
It's really too bad things like Electron aren't better, because making cross platform applications is kind of daunting and so a lot of places just put it on the
by nixpulvis 1y ago
It's really too bad things like Electron aren't better, because making cross platform applications is kind of daunting and so a lot of places just put it on the web.
- wiseowise 1y agoTechnology choice is orthogonal to what I've said.
- nixpulvis 1y agoI agree it's separate, though I offer an explanation for why we see more and more apps which should be offline-first developed online.
- luckylion 1y agoThe reason everything is SaaS and Cloud-based apps isn't technical, it's commercial. You have much more control online than offline, that's the number one reason. Everything else is so distant that you can ignore it for most intents and purposes.
- skydhash 1y agoIs it? Then how do calibre, VLC, GIMP, LibreOffice,… manage to do it? And these have much more complicated interface than most electron apps.
- nixpulvis 1y agoThey probably use something like Qt, which is probably what a lot more apps should use. But when you have a workforce that knows React, you build webapps.
- fourside 1y agoQt’s licensing makes adoption harder than it needs to be.
- presentation 1y agoUglier ones too
- skydhash 1y agoAre you looking for something to look at or something to use?
- nixpulvis 1y agoSometimes eye candy actually helps usability. There was a time when I would have argued Apple did this best, but lately I feel less this way. Still, look at apps like Zed. Beauty in its simplicity. That's worth a lot. What frameworks like Qt often suffer from is an outdated or overly restrictive design language which is harder than worthwhile to customize, so you get apps that feel antiquated. Some people aren't as bothered by this as others, and generally I agree it shouldn't matter, but it does.
- skydhash 1y ago> Sometimes eye candy actually helps usability. I strongly doubt so. Eye candy becomes quickly old when you're using the software for hours a day.
- buzzerbetrayed 1y agoNot all software is used hours a day. Some software needs to be intuitive so the user doesn’t need to invest hours to learn it. And visuals play a huge part in that.
- skydhash 1y ago> Some software needs to be intuitive so the user doesn’t need to invest hours to learn it. Consistency helps more than aesthetics at this point. Shared metaphors and all that.
- paradox460 1y ago
- Balinares 1y agoWith an enormous amount of unpaid labor. Libraries like PyQt (which Calibre uses, for instance) make it feasible at all. They still won't save you the moment you encounter any platform-specific corner case, of which there are uncountable multitudes. Tip your OSS projects. They earned it more than you know.
- bowsamic 1y ago> Libraries like PyQt (which Calibre uses, for instance) make it feasible at all. Writing Qt in C++ or using QtQuick is really not that bad
- skydhash 1y agoI think it's still less than the amount of effort the VS Code team has put in trying to make Electron work. The guys (I believe only two) at Sublime HQ have managed to create a cross platform UI that is efficient and works well.
- nixpulvis 1y agoKinda depends if you want to find developers willing and able to reinvent a lot of things or not. If you can justify rebuilding a textbox or scrollbar (for example) then perhaps you can roll your own solution. Otherwise you look for libraries. The web is rich with 3rd party support for a lot of things, so as a platform it's attractive. If you need to grow, you can be more confident it will have what you need. But with that also comes a lot of bloat, legacy and poor decisions too.
- cyral 1y agoWasn't gimp patching a compiled executable because nobody on the team had a Mac at one point?
- lerp-io 1y agogimp sucks dude, vlc is just ffmpeg wrapper
- owebmaster 1y agoThat is not a problem for offline-first as we have service workers and PWAs for that.