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0 pointsridiculous_fish4y ago0 comments

These are not "random bugs" but deeply established Mac UI conventions. My point is not "Electron apps are buggy," it's that they are undermining an established set of UI conventions, without advancing a replacement.

There's a virtuous cycle when apps use a platform's native components: apps get the standard UI behaviors for free, users can bring their knowledge from one app to another, and the platform owner can enhance the UI frameworks, improving all the apps on the platform. At least that's the hope.

I can see a future dominated by Electron apps. But Electron is not converging on a new set of UI behaviors that I can bring from one app to another. In any given Electron app, gestures like arrow keys work differently not only from native apps, but from other Electron apps. So I don't use the arrow keys: one less word in my UI vocabulary.

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westoncb4y ago· 2 in thread

Okay I think I see what you're saying here. The terminology of reducing "UI vocabulary" threw me off some, since you could alternately describe it as an expansion of UI vocabulary: so many things don't have a convention yet that every developer is free to define their own (similar situation in e.g. video game UI where there's constant invention since a fixed widget set isn't getting re-used).

> ... they are undermining an established set of UI conventions, without advancing a replacement.

> There's a virtuous cycle when apps use a platform's native components

There's certainly an advantage there, but it basically comes down to whether you more highly value cross-platform capabilities or specialization for a specific platform. So why not acknowledge it as the tradeoff it is? Instead the common stance here is to frame it as some kind of cataclysmic regression in software development.

Anecdotally, as someone using mostly Electron-based software, I've yet to run into any kind of issue related to platform integration—but I wouldn't be surprised if people ran into an occasional glitch or inconvenience there. It makes sense given what the software is.

ryandrake4y ago

> whether you more highly value cross-platform capabilities or specialization for a specific platform.

I'd argue that very few, if any, end users care that an application works and looks exactly the same on Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux. The typical end user has one platform they use, and they expect their applications to behave consistently with each other on that platform.

The people who tend to care about being consistent across platforms are 1. developers who don't want to write platform-specific code to properly support each platform, and 2. designers for whom platform conventions are inconvenient constraints and get in the way of the great vision they drew in Photoshop. In other words, not end users, who are usually the actual target market.

westoncb4y ago

I agree with your analysis, but there's a little more to it. Indirectly, there are two important ways in which end users benefit significantly:

1. Higher likelihood that the app will be available at all on their platform.

2. Companies/developers are able to direct resources more to features end users are actually interested in, vs spending on rebuilding for multiple platforms.

I think both Discord and VS Code are pretty solid examples of this. The rate at which they delivered their extensive feature sets to mac/win/linux felt like something totally new: I don't recall any other case of seeing such high quality, complex software show up for multiple platforms so suddenly in that way. (Of course I'm very intentionally saying 'felt' here—I have no objective measure)

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