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Comment by jkarneges | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see a native app and not something Electron-based.

I wonder about native app viability these days though. Years ago I used native email apps like Outlook, KMail, and Thunderbird, but lately I just use the websites made by the service providers (Fastmail for personal, Gmail for work). As an open standards person I find my behavior kind of depressing, but the websites just tend to work better.

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SwiftUI will make the native application development experience much easier for Apple platforms. It still has a little ways to go, but once it's the "de-facto standard" for new apps, you will certainly see an explosion in innovative native development.

Hoping other platforms follow suit. Preferably using SwiftUI...hey, I can dream right?

> Hoping other platforms follow suit. Preferably using SwiftUI...hey, I can dream right?

This makes it seems like it's up to those other platforms, but it's really all about Apple's decision, right? (in which case I'll eat my metaphorical hat if this happens)

SwiftUI concepts are quite old actually,

https://groovy-lang.org/swing.html

That's a very fair question. Web apps made by providers are definitely several steps ahead feature-wise, because standardized protocols take a lot of time to evolve. My hope with Mimestream is to strike a middle ground here, by using the Gmail API to support more of the Gmail featureset, while retaining the ergonomics of a native client.

First thing I did when I clicked on comments is Cmd+F for "Electron". I was so relieved to find your comment. Electron apps are fine, but you have to pay me to use them :-)

Same here, I only use them for work purposes.

- Plain web app, eventually PWA

- cli/daemon + native browser

- web widget

No need to package a full browser with the application, unless one just wants to be lazy and avoid writing browser agnostic code.

Every application shipped Electron besides contributing to global warming, is yet another point increase in Chrome market dominance.

You'd only need a couple thousand users a year to keep it viable for a 1-2 person team.

I mean, it's still running WebKit (most likely through a WKWebView) at some point to render any HTML mail.

There truly is no escape.

But that’s just for the email content. The UI itself is implemented with native controls

Yes, but it doesn't ship a whole browser with it, it makes use of what the OS offers out of the box.

WebKit is not Bink, and it is good so, we don't need Chrome über alles, aka ChromeOS.

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