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Comment by rvanmil | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic app, instabuy. I'm really happy to see these kinds of native Mac apps being successful for so long. They're a breath of fresh air amidst all the Electron crap lately.

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Agreed. I get that it's easier to build a singular cross platform app using a JS framework, but the decrease in quality from a well done native app really shows. I'm looking at you Spotify, todoist, Slack and others

> I get that it's easier to build a singular cross platform app using a JS framework

More like to wrap a website. I doubt that it's easier than Qt when building from scratch.

It's easier than Qt in so far as I don't know C or how to distribute a Qt based app with all the necessary libraries.

Qt programming is done in C++ or Python and it includes everything required inside the distributed app package. It's also easily skinned to look very close to native UIs (see VLC).

I've never used both of these languages and wrote only simple things in JS but I would spend a week learning Python syntax and Qt features to deliver a better UX and performance for a cross-platform app.

QT tries to match the native style by default. Although if I remember on macOS the toolbar doesn't work properly without stupid hacks

VLC on macOS uses Cocoa and not Qt. Only Linux and Windows versions use Qt and on the Linux/Wayland desktop, it looks quite atrocious.

Distribution is a massive issue with all these. Electron makes it easy but still results in massive bloat.

Atom, Discord, Etcher are all Electron apps (I am pretty sure?) and I think they work great.

Atom doesn't handle large files very well and it hangs a lot. Sublime ftw

You can pry Electron-based VS Code from my cold, dead hands. I'm grateful that it's cross-platform and available on Linux - I have pretty much stopped using a fully paid-for PyCharm, which I previously considered the best IDE. Being "native" is overrated, seeing that my top 2 IDEs are both not native apps, or look at any JetBrains product.

I still think it's possible to build good non-native apps, but it's hard and you need to pay attention to details.

I've written a logviewer with electron. Getting the custom painted table-component and column-reordering to look and feel like Finder or iTunes tables was at least 10 hours of work.

Working on memory allocation so that javascript GC wouldn't introduce lags now and then was another 5 hours. (That is the main performance problem with non-native apps, I think.)

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