2 ms·

I really hate Electron, but something is so rotten under macOS that even some of Apple's own native apps are appalling. The Settings and Passwords apps are so b

by drcongo 7mo ago

I really hate Electron, but something is so rotten under macOS that even some of Apple's own native apps are appalling. The Settings and Passwords apps are so bad as to be almost unusable, I'd love to know how and why they're that bad - are they catalyst, or just badly made?

nullbyte 7mo ago
They did something to Settings after MacOS Monterey that made it very slow. I miss the snappiness of the old app!
- dilap 7mo ago
  I don't know for a fact, but I'd bet a few digits of cold hard cash it's a SwiftUI rewrite that is to blame. (Any1 in the know want to chime in?) And yeah, it's terrible. Apple doesn't make good apps anymore. (This is part of why I think electron does so well -- it's not as good as a really good native app [e.g. Sublime Text], but it's way better than the sort of default whatever you'll get doing native. You get a lot of niceness that's built into the web stack.)
- poszlem 7mo ago
  Well, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they started using webviews for stuff like system UI: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/ https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...
jen20 7mo ago
While there are missing features (e.g. ability to merge records), I have to say that Passwords.app is worlds ahead of 1Password since their electron rewrite. System Settings is not the best (mostly because the search is broken), but Passwords is sufficiently good that I haven't bothered looking what it's written using, whereas I can immediately tell with Electron.
- drcongo 7mo ago
  Hard agree on 1Password. After Slack it's probably the worst Electron app on my Mac.
- bloomca 7mo ago
  System Settings is so slow for the amount of contents it has that I have to say it is probably the worst offender per content capita
isjdisjdj 7mo ago
Some of their apps do run web views disguised as native applications—Apple Music, for instance. Passwords works fine for me, Settings does display notorious lag loading icons, but Apple Music is by far the most disgustingly bad “native” app. Everything is slow on that one, everything takes ages to load, everything makes scrolling choke and stutter, everything even looks like a website crammed inside a desktop window, and to top it all off, the feature disparity between mobile and desktop is so large that you can still see remnants of iTunes floating around on desktop while still not being able to sync the entire condition-set of smart playlists between devices. It’s appalling. But hey, Apple is a small company after all, they must lack the resources to make their once flagship service run decently on these powerful new chips.

by drcongo 7mo ago

nullbyte 7mo ago

They did something to Settings after MacOS Monterey that made it very slow. I miss the snappiness of the old app!

dilap 7mo ago
I don't know for a fact, but I'd bet a few digits of cold hard cash it's a SwiftUI rewrite that is to blame. (Any1 in the know want to chime in?) And yeah, it's terrible. Apple doesn't make good apps anymore. (This is part of why I think electron does so well -- it's not as good as a really good native app [e.g. Sublime Text], but it's way better than the sort of default whatever you'll get doing native. You get a lot of niceness that's built into the web stack.)
poszlem 7mo ago
Well, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they started using webviews for stuff like system UI: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/ https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...

jen20 7mo ago

While there are missing features (e.g. ability to merge records), I have to say that Passwords.app is worlds ahead of 1Password since their electron rewrite. System Settings is not the best (mostly because the search is broken), but Passwords is sufficiently good that I haven't bothered looking what it's written using, whereas I can immediately tell with Electron.

drcongo 7mo ago
Hard agree on 1Password. After Slack it's probably the worst Electron app on my Mac.
bloomca 7mo ago
System Settings is so slow for the amount of contents it has that I have to say it is probably the worst offender per content capita

isjdisjdj 7mo ago

Some of their apps do run web views disguised as native applications—Apple Music, for instance. Passwords works fine for me, Settings does display notorious lag loading icons, but Apple Music is by far the most disgustingly bad “native” app. Everything is slow on that one, everything takes ages to load, everything makes scrolling choke and stutter, everything even looks like a website crammed inside a desktop window, and to top it all off, the feature disparity between mobile and desktop is so large that you can still see remnants of iTunes floating around on desktop while still not being able to sync the entire condition-set of smart playlists between devices. It’s appalling. But hey, Apple is a small company after all, they must lack the resources to make their once flagship service run decently on these powerful new chips.