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Why does a Mac-only app that shows a menu bar icon and a notification popup need to be Electron…? That’s 30 lines of Swift, max.
by rafram 1y ago
Why does a Mac-only app that shows a menu bar icon and a notification popup need to be Electron…? That’s 30 lines of Swift, max.
- outofpaper 1y agoPeople forget to think about Swift let alone tools like Platypus.
- encom 1y agoBecause that's all anyone knows, and PC development is dead. >content-length: 47262814 Sigh...
- SR2Z 1y agoIf you want a frontend for you app, you probably just use Electron and get it over with in a few minutes instead of digging through the docs for Qt or some other framework. Is it worth it? Probably not, since this is a single-platform app to start with, but JS+HTML are easy to theme and customize, and Qt is... not quite as simple.
- manbitesdog 1y agoNow that you can build such an app with AI in under 20 minutes with a manageable codebase you can properly understand and control, I don't think that's a good excuse anymore
- paxys 1y ago> with a manageable codebase you can properly understand and control Yeah, that definitely describes every AI codebase I have seen..
- whatevaa 1y agoIf you don't know the language, how can you properly understand and control it?
- therein 1y agoIn 2025 you unfortunately just vibe with the code nowadays.
- rafram 1y agoWhere did you get Qt from? This is, again, a Mac-only app that doesn’t even have any windows. It’s just a menu bar icon and a notification. That’s incredibly simple to build with plain old Cocoa and Swift.
- righthand 1y agoNo one has to dig through electron docs though right? There is nothing simple about an electron app regardless how little logic you personally programmed on top of it.
- jeroenhd 1y agoIf you don't know Swift, but do know Electron, it's easier to do it in 30 lines of Javascript. People who don't like the developers work can always write and publish their own application, of course.
- whatevaa 1y agoIt's hard work writing free stuff for others, much easier to criticise stuff instead of getting your hands dirty.
- pwdisswordfishz 1y agoIt's hard work learning programming tools and optimizing, much easier to use a one-size-fits all framework that wastes the end-user's resources.
- chipsrafferty 1y agoWhat's the incentive to spend a lot of time to optimize for something you're giving away for free?
- nsonha 1y agoIt's NOT intelectually challenging. Software engineers love to learn new things, but they do not love 10 different syntaxes for displaying stuff. Figure it out.
- steviedotboston 1y agoI just asked ChatGPT to write a Swift program to renew MAC addresses with a menu bar icon and it had no problem with it. Just over 50 lines.
- palata 1y agoElectron is an overkill way to not have to learn how to do stuff properly, if you ask me. And people love not to learn.
- WJW 1y agoSend in a PR then?
- ipaddr 1y agoA pr that deletes the repo and bans the person from github?
- WJW 1y agoNo a PR that actually makes the world a better place. Be the change you want to see and all that.
- pwdisswordfishz 1y agoBy deleting the repo and banning the person from GitHub?
- WJW 1y ago[flagged]
- CamperBob2 1y agoI mean, these days, you ask an LLM and it spits out code that will, for something this simple, probably work the first time.
- WJW 1y agoShould take you no more than 5 minutes then.
- CamperBob2 1y agoWhatever. I'm not the one who used 47 MB to distribute a single line of code.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zymhan 1y ago[flagged]
- CamperBob2 1y agoThis isn't about me. Let's not make it about me.
- thisislife2 1y agoIt doesn't need to be - on macOS, it could even just as well have been a simple Xbar Plug-In! ( https://xbarapp.com/ https://xbarapp.com/ ).
- rafram 1y agoOr Alfred script, Raycast plugin, Shortcuts shortcut, shell alias, and the list goes on. There are a lot of decent options; "50+ MB Electron app" is, in my opinion, not one.
- gopher_space 1y agoIs ActionScript still a thing on Macs? I feel like that tech was almost criminally overlooked while being the backbone for a lot of processing pipelines back in the day.
- mattl 1y agoYou mean AppleScript?
- rafram 1y agoIt (AppleScript) is, and you can actually write JS instead these days, with a criminally underdocumented Objective-C bridge (JXA).
- gopher_space 1y agoAhh thanks! Went down a brief rabbit hole with JXA and had forgotten how opaque Apple is when you're developing for them.
- latexr 1y ago> with a criminally underdocumented Objective-C bridge The documentation is the Objective-C docs, I use those all the time. You do need to understand the basics of how to translate from the Objective-C APIs to what JXA (or AppleScript) expects, but once it clicks you can do it for essentially anything with the same logic.
- al_borland 1y agoI was preparing for the death of AppleScript and was shocked when I stumbled around their addition of JS a few years back. I thought that would have been big enough news to hit my radar when it happened, or that Apple would have made a big deal about it at WWDC. Of course, that would require them to fully support AppleScript in their newer apps, while instead they seem to really only care about Shortcuts, since that’s easier to sell on mobile, I assume.
- k4rli 1y agoLooks like ai-generated bloat. It even has deps for deb+rpm builds yet is mac only. Honestly would not expect anything more from js devs who use macs/windows. I see this so often.
- ajsnigrutin 1y ago1) the dev only had a hammer and he nailed the screw in 2) the dev has 64gigs of ram and a newest CPU and doesn't care about performance issues for people on older computers... that's why you need gigs of ram just to read a weather report online.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]