I'm not excusing it, I curse Slack every day I have to use their Electron app (though mostly just use it in a browser tab now) but we have this exact same conversation every time anything about Electron is posted on HN. None of the parameters for making the choice have changed since the last time we did.
I did that too for the last couple of years, but recently switched to this client: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ Found the link in comments here on HN.
Works well so far. There’re couple minor UX issues, e.g. hard to react to messages with these modern hieroglyphs, also images are loaded in web browser, but I can live with them. The upsides (ability to setup font faces and sizes, resource usage, GUI latency) are far more important for me.
And don't tell me development time will be remotely similar either.
- Easy cross platform support
- Singular language/framework (typescript/react) for everything you're doing
- Can share a lot of components/logic with mobile apps if you use React Native
You get substandard desktop applications that tend to frustrate people who are deeply immersed in any one ecosystem and expect native applications to have deep integration with each platform and comply with each platform’s design sensibilities.
But history shows that applications written against cross-platform toolkits have done just fine, as have applications that completely embraced “going native” on particular platforms.
I’m left with the thought that either strategy works if you go “all in,” the mistakes come from:
1. Going cross-platform but then doing ridiculous back-flips to try to make the app feel really, really native. Just take what the platform gives you, and accept that you’re giving people a web-like experience that happens to have some native affordances. Learn to live with the few complaints from retro-grouches.
Or, 2. Going native, but skimping on deep integration and fully embracing the look and feel of each platform. This is one of those “penny-wise, pound-foolish’ strategies: You ship faster, but you lose the big benefits of a cross-platform tool, and you don’t satisfy the users that appreciate what a native app offers in look, feel, and integration.
Do I want my CAD software as an electron app. Obviously not, but for most applications electron is just as good an option as anything else.
Also known as "laziness," "greed," and "lack of pride in one's work."
I'm OK with some rando startup using something like Electron in their formative years. But companies like Microsoft have no excuse other than some middle manager's desire to buy a new boat.
Good enough for me to consider tech. Means you can have acceptable result without spending more money.
It's not just a monetary/time/effort value to Microsoft or other developers either. It has value to me a user. I prefer applications that I can take with me anywhere I go and they'll be exactly the same on every type of desktop that I use them on.
The list of native desktop applications which can actually do this well for me is pretty short.
Realistically, you won’t need to chain window movement like this in most cases (other than our chatbox, I think none of our windows stay open when their parent window is moved). Fast auto-resizing, on the other hand, is more common, and works great.
We can get the position of our _own_ windows easily, but when it comes to getting Spotify’s position, we need to do some more complex polling, which is slower (and only works when the 3rd-party window is in focus).
What's Tandem are doing here is (interesting, but) atypical behaviour.
See this demo: http://stewd.io/pong/
It's still not 100% smooth, but it seems slightly better and demonstrates the ability to manually tween values. Similar performance in both Chrome and Safari.
Is this a macOS specific issue, or is the JS API these guys are providing not able to catch up quickly enough?
In the actual Tandem app, windows moving like this is uncommon.
