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Photon – Framework for Electron apps

81 points| K-Wall | 10 years ago |photonkit.com | reply

20 comments

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[+] andrewmcwatters|10 years ago|reply
The problem that I have with Connor Sears' work and others, like the Ionic Team's is that they don't look anything like the target platform.

I'd love to work with something that was the framework equivalent of the iOS9 UI kit produced by Teehan+Lax/Facebook, or any properly designed replica of another platform, but no one produces such things. All you're left with is mediocre rip-offs that are tasteless.

I don't want to make a Photon app. I don't want to make an Ionic app. I want to make an iOS app. If you want to compete with native, compete with native and actually try.

[+] mcao|10 years ago|reply
I guess I don't understand what makes this Electron specific. It looks like a UI kit similar to Bootstrap and others. Maybe it's too early in the project, but some mention of how the Node portions of Electron are used would be helpful.
[+] giancarlostoro|10 years ago|reply
Yeah it looks like an attempt to create a UI kit, which I think is helpful for those who want to work with Electron without having to actually design their entire interface. I imagine it will get better overtime and become fine tuned for Electron in specific.

edit: typo

[+] WorldMaker|10 years ago|reply
This seems like a great start. Hopefully they'll get good looking Windows and Linux themes together as well.
[+] giancarlostoro|10 years ago|reply
I'm really hoping this becomes the case, if not, then at least a more neutral looking interface so that it transfers smoother across platforms. I guess kind of how IntelliJ maintains a nice interface across platforms and similar projects.
[+] baghira|10 years ago|reply
This doesn't sound as a good name given the existence of: https://vmware.github.io/photon/ Granted, in the context of atom and electron it makes sense, but still.
[+] lultimouomo|10 years ago|reply
Also an unfortunate name clash with the Photon and Electron embedded boards by Particle...
[+] davej|10 years ago|reply
Yeah, as someone who works with Electron, the naming is often frustrating for doing Google searches. Wished they had stayed with atom-shell for that reason.
[+] cbuq|10 years ago|reply
I believe these frameworks are very cool and web-apps as desktop-apps is probably the future.

My biggest concern is how these technologies will work in the commercial world.

Do I now need to license Photon, Electron, NodeWebkit, Node, Webkit + friends?

[+] WorldMaker|10 years ago|reply
All of the technologies here, including Photon, are open sourced under commercial-friendly open source licenses (the MIT license being most common in this space.)

Electron is a "competitor" to NW.js (previously known as NodeWebkit). It was developed by Github for their commercial and non-commercial applications.

There should be no concerns about using these things in commercial projects. But you don't have to take my word for it, all of these projects have open source repositories, most of them on GitHub, and you can check their LICENSE files for yourself.

[+] 0942v8653|10 years ago|reply
> web-apps as desktop-apps is probably the future

Can you expand on this? I'm interested in your viewpoint because the general consensus on HN seems to be that webapps are better off as webapps and desktop apps are better off as desktop apps—being in the browser seems to be good enough for most webapps, and when packaging something as a desktop app there are little quirks that mess it up.

[+] john-kelly|10 years ago|reply
would love a yeoman generator for this.
[+] hlfcoding|10 years ago|reply
Honestly why? Will you make that many desktop apps that are all the same?