> Electron represents something of an existential crisis for Apple. If developers can build with web-based frameworks, they’re less likely to use Apple’s tools, services, and ultimately, its App Store.
Most Mac apps are distributed outside of the Mac App Store.
> To demo such an exciting framework, you’d expect big names like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, which could theoretically bring off-line video playback to the Mac for the first time
Nobody seems to have really been clamoring for native apps for these…
> developers like Netflix, which need to build for other platforms anyway, will keep using Electron for other apps
Yeah, no. Netflix makes “native” apps for a mind-boggling number of platforms, including set-top boxes and game consoles.
> A better example of this idea can be found in Chromebooks, where Google allows almost any Android app to be used without modification. Want to run Instagram or stream with Spotify’s mobile app? It works as you’d expect, with all of the benefits from the mobile app in tow.
No, it doesn’t: have you tried to scroll in one of those apps? That’s right, most of the time you have to drag your cursor across the screen.
> If you’re a company like Slack, it’s cheaper and easier for you to target every desktop platform with Electron
> Building them is also an expensive, slow job that requires a team of developers and designers — particularly if they’re building for multiple platforms, like Windows, macOS, and Linux, at the same time.
That is just blatantly wrong. There's cross platform toolkits like Gtk/Qt/Swing/others that I'd say are still easier to build apps with than electron. There's RAD tools like WinForms and VB that let you drag'n'drop most of the UI if you're happy targeting a single platform.
Electron is still not as good as these options were 20 years ago, the only thing it has going for it are a legion of web developers that are seemingly incapable of learning something different.
> There's RAD tools like WinForms and VB that let you drag'n'drop most of the UI if you're happy targeting a single platform.
Even if you want cross-platform native RAD development, there's options like Xojo / REALbasic [1], at least for Windows / Mac / Linux / RaspberryPi development. I'd bet that most of the Xojo developers are single-person coding shops, and certainly don't have big teams of developers & designers behind them.
Electron is definitely not the only option out there. Anecdata, but most of the people I know personally making money from single-developer cross-platform apps are using Qt, not Electron.
further ignoring mac in favor of an ipad framework that ALSO works on mac along with mac hardware refresh essentially ignoring heat issues(and keyboard issues) leads me to think apple is going to evolve past the mac completely. They just don't want users to use web apps on macs and lose their stranglehold on the app store.
Things like flutter/react are completely going to devour the platform specific space for everything except usecases that require specific hardware(which apple is also losing because they're ignoring scientific/gaming marketshare by cold-shouldering nvidia,ML and AAA game devs in general).
i think apple is trying to "hunker down" until internet speeds improve enough that everyone is using a streaming service for all the hardware intensive stuff and they can continue selling pretty thin clients like ipads/iphones/iARGlasses
> Its goal is to make building a native app as easy as building with Electron.
1. Building with Electron is not easy
2. Building native apps is easy (at least was the last time I checked on Windows some decades ago, I guess it's not harder now)
Depends on where you come from. If you're already accustomed to the web stack you'll love Electron. If you come from a .NET background or something similar, you'll prefer native.
Either I, or apple, don't get the benefit of electron.
If I only want to target one OS, I already know better options they electron. What electron gets you is Linux, Windows and mac support with less work than any other platform (in my experience)
Run dual 4K monitors on a Linux box on both nvidia and AMD GPU and all my electron apps turn into a flickery, randomly not rendering mess. Currently running what I can in Firefox, but VS Code still needs to me on my desktop and is still a mess unless I disable GPU acceleration.
People forget that most apps start off as a dozen lines to solve someone's individual problem.
Qt is nice. GTK is... ok. But to get a cross-platform build with either of them requires a couple of hours' fiddling around. The later you wait to go cross-platform, the more platform-specific assumptions creep into your code and the longer it'll take. But no-one wants to spend that couple of hours fiddling around right at the start of their project, when it's just a dozen lines to fix their own problem.
With electron you write that dozen line helper utility and you're automatically cross-platform from day 1. And not just in the kind of theoretical way you get with say PyQt where your application could be made to build on another platform if you spent a couple of hours fiddling with the build; the alternate-platform binaries are just there. That's powerful.
I'm partial to GTK (it's just C and doesn't need a special pre-processor) but Qt does a much better job of looking decent on non-linux computers. There's probably some other options worth considering like libUI and Tk.
Extending this question a bit, a framework I'm curious about is JavaFX. A modern GUI toolkit targeting the JVM sounds like something that could rival Electron, especially if they manage to get installation right (would probably involve embedding the JVM). One would be able to write cross-platform desktop apps in Kotlin or Clojure for example. But I don't see a lot of people using it, or even mentioning it at all...
Qt, wxWidgets, Gtk(mm) - I'll take such framework even if I want to develop for a single platform - the sane APIs and you can always fallback to '#ifdef platform' as needed (rare).
I don't think this is the right solution. Something like React Native where the core logic is shared but the UI/Views can be tailored to each environment is ideal.
I believe Microsoft released some React Native stuff for desktop and hopefully, there is some work going on for MacOS.
Doesn't project Catalyst mean that we'd be able to build react-native iOS apps on macOS? :D That would be great, cause with MS support you can build react-native apps on Windows and even Xbox already, just Linux is still out of reach.
Comment about Jira is awful. Jira is perfect example. Because it sucks on web, but perfect on mobile. They almost convinced to come back to Jira instead of notion.
But how Apple building Catalyst is going to killing Electron? Electron is cross-platform. So, for many companies, it will be still the first choice unless they are only building for Apple only ecosystem.
You can't expect Apple to not invest on the tooling for its own platform even if cross-platform solutions are great.
If your iOS software uses as much memory as Electron apps on PC, there is something really wrong with your software, and you should profile it to see where that memory goes.
I doubt any Electron user will jump the Catalyst wagon. Catalyst is not portable/is Mac only. Electron is easier to use/uses well known APIs/tech stack
The problem is, Macs are too expensive and underpowered these days. More important than developers are users. Right now the Mac is sort of a tax levied on iOS developers
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
> Electron represents something of an existential crisis for Apple. If developers can build with web-based frameworks, they’re less likely to use Apple’s tools, services, and ultimately, its App Store.
Most Mac apps are distributed outside of the Mac App Store.
> To demo such an exciting framework, you’d expect big names like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, which could theoretically bring off-line video playback to the Mac for the first time
Nobody seems to have really been clamoring for native apps for these…
> developers like Netflix, which need to build for other platforms anyway, will keep using Electron for other apps
Yeah, no. Netflix makes “native” apps for a mind-boggling number of platforms, including set-top boxes and game consoles.
> A better example of this idea can be found in Chromebooks, where Google allows almost any Android app to be used without modification. Want to run Instagram or stream with Spotify’s mobile app? It works as you’d expect, with all of the benefits from the mobile app in tow.
No, it doesn’t: have you tried to scroll in one of those apps? That’s right, most of the time you have to drag your cursor across the screen.
> If you’re a company like Slack, it’s cheaper and easier for you to target every desktop platform with Electron
No, because Slack already has an iPad app.
[+] [-] suvelx|6 years ago|reply
I think all of the STB platforms (at least in the UK) are HTML & JS now. I think they used to be flash.
[+] [-] armitron|6 years ago|reply
> Most Mac apps are distributed outside of the Mac App Store.
How does that make the author's statement wrong?
> Nobody seems to have really been clamoring for native apps for these…
"Nobody seems". Subjective. Also sounds wrong to me since it goes against my personal experience.
> Yeah, no. Netflix makes “native” apps for a mind-boggling number of platforms, including set-top boxes and game consoles.
How does that make the author's statement wrong?
> No, it doesn’t: have you tried to scroll in one of those apps? That’s right, most of the time you have to drag your cursor across the screen.
Not my experience.
> No, because Slack already has an iPad app.
Irrelevant. How does that make the author's statement wrong?
[+] [-] chrisbolt|6 years ago|reply
49% of the page is non-scrollable on an iPad (811 of 1668 vertical pixels). Unreadable.
[+] [-] kgraves|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trishmapow2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] movedx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/PO3z3ST.jpg
[+] [-] eafkuor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|6 years ago|reply
That is just blatantly wrong. There's cross platform toolkits like Gtk/Qt/Swing/others that I'd say are still easier to build apps with than electron. There's RAD tools like WinForms and VB that let you drag'n'drop most of the UI if you're happy targeting a single platform.
Electron is still not as good as these options were 20 years ago, the only thing it has going for it are a legion of web developers that are seemingly incapable of learning something different.
[+] [-] SyneRyder|6 years ago|reply
Even if you want cross-platform native RAD development, there's options like Xojo / REALbasic [1], at least for Windows / Mac / Linux / RaspberryPi development. I'd bet that most of the Xojo developers are single-person coding shops, and certainly don't have big teams of developers & designers behind them.
Electron is definitely not the only option out there. Anecdata, but most of the people I know personally making money from single-developer cross-platform apps are using Qt, not Electron.
[1] https://www.xojo.com/
[+] [-] ex3ndr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sameer_hacker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkarakk|6 years ago|reply
Things like flutter/react are completely going to devour the platform specific space for everything except usecases that require specific hardware(which apple is also losing because they're ignoring scientific/gaming marketshare by cold-shouldering nvidia,ML and AAA game devs in general).
i think apple is trying to "hunker down" until internet speeds improve enough that everyone is using a streaming service for all the hardware intensive stuff and they can continue selling pretty thin clients like ipads/iphones/iARGlasses
[+] [-] jablan|6 years ago|reply
1. Building with Electron is not easy 2. Building native apps is easy (at least was the last time I checked on Windows some decades ago, I guess it's not harder now)
[+] [-] t0astbread|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apersona|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imedadel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CJefferson|6 years ago|reply
If I only want to target one OS, I already know better options they electron. What electron gets you is Linux, Windows and mac support with less work than any other platform (in my experience)
[+] [-] thefounder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Teknoman117|6 years ago|reply
Run dual 4K monitors on a Linux box on both nvidia and AMD GPU and all my electron apps turn into a flickery, randomly not rendering mess. Currently running what I can in Firefox, but VS Code still needs to me on my desktop and is still a mess unless I disable GPU acceleration.
Two years guys, please...
[+] [-] dmos62|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|6 years ago|reply
Qt is nice. GTK is... ok. But to get a cross-platform build with either of them requires a couple of hours' fiddling around. The later you wait to go cross-platform, the more platform-specific assumptions creep into your code and the longer it'll take. But no-one wants to spend that couple of hours fiddling around right at the start of their project, when it's just a dozen lines to fix their own problem.
With electron you write that dozen line helper utility and you're automatically cross-platform from day 1. And not just in the kind of theoretical way you get with say PyQt where your application could be made to build on another platform if you spent a couple of hours fiddling with the build; the alternate-platform binaries are just there. That's powerful.
[+] [-] flukus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmsaksida|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phire|6 years ago|reply
Everything else is worse.
[+] [-] rapsey|6 years ago|reply
Solving the “apple” side of the equasion is no solution at all.
[+] [-] nahtnam|6 years ago|reply
I believe Microsoft released some React Native stuff for desktop and hopefully, there is some work going on for MacOS.
[+] [-] xenorplxx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenorplxx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonbeebe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ex3ndr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stunt|6 years ago|reply
You can't expect Apple to not invest on the tooling for its own platform even if cross-platform solutions are great.
[+] [-] ex3ndr|6 years ago|reply
I am not convinced that v8 itself have something wrong with memory usage. Same app without electron will take same amount of memory.
[+] [-] LeoNatan25|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluesign|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefounder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panpanna|6 years ago|reply
If i want to write apple only code, I code in swift.
[+] [-] rado|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|6 years ago|reply
I flag seldom, but this one really deserves it.
[+] [-] fopen64|6 years ago|reply