Photon – Framework for Electron apps | Hacker News Reader

Photon – Framework for Electron apps

photonkit.com

81 pointsK-Wall20 comments

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.

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.

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

This seems like a great start. Hopefully they'll get good looking Windows and Linux themes together as well.

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.

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.

Also an unfortunate name clash with the Photon and Electron embedded boards by Particle...

At this rate I also foresee a clash with Phonon and Plasma from the KDE project.

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.

at least they didn't name it "go"?

At least go can be searched for with 'golang'.

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?

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.

> 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.

As giancarlostoro mentioned, it's mostly about the web ecosystem; web apps have an amazing number of opensource projects to take advantage of. I see a huge benefit from being cross-platform (windows/osx/linux/android/ios/even blackberry) and only having to develop and maintain one ui. Some examples I can think of are Spotify, Atom, Thunderbird. Web technologies are also being standardized more than many desktop technologies have been; - HTML5 (<video>, <canvas>, <template>) - CSS (styling) - WebRTC (peer-to-peer communication) - WebGL (3d) - Local Storage (local persistent storage) - Web Workers (threading) - Device APIs (geolocation, orientation, camera, other sensors)

I don't mean throw your website behind a mini-browser and call it desktop app, but if you design a desktop application with web technologies there are some very interesting combinations.

I also think the biggest gains come from realizing this is literally just the ui. The desktop application doesn't have to be written in javascript, you can still write your application logic in c++, and all you have to do is expose an endpoint and talk over localhost!

Web apps not in the normal sense. You get to design a desktop application that takes advantage of web technologies, but gives you full native access with projects like Electron and NW.js so it's really native apps built on top of web technologies, which a browser is pretty native. Instead of having to download Qt or another C++ toolkit and worry about the lincensing, you download a 30MB browser (or however big it is) that is MIT licensed, and comes with Node.js out of the box giving you all of Node without having installed Node to begin with. It's really interesting in my opinion.

So is this just some sort of UI elements for electron? I don't understand what it offers that's new?

This is what it offers: http://photonkit.com/components/

As well as something in the way of a template for you to build on.

would love a yeoman generator for this.

Honestly why? Will you make that many desktop apps that are all the same?

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