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Comment by folkrav | Hacker News Reader

> While we'll keep building the native macOS application as a first-class citizen, we're introducing today Paw for the Web, Paw for Windows and Paw for Linux!

Straight from their announcement.

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That would be great but I have a hard time believing it'll stay like that. Maintaining two code bases instead of making the "native macOS application" a Electron wrapper around their other code base doesn't seem scalable in the long run.

That's moving the goalposts. The concern was for the native UI to get abandoned, it isn't. It may, or may not. The existence of the cross-platform version is hardly an indicator. If anything, having only the macOS version limited their reach and future expansion.

Not necessarily. The concern was "because it’s not web-based", which could mean that they don't like the web UI or the web based technology stack behind it.

For me a native app has to both look and feel native. An app that looks like a native app (Like an Electron app can) isn't fully native for me because it still runs a web browser under the hood.

I dislike Electron as much as the next guy, but that description of what's "native" is IMHO quite arbitrary. Anything using a cross-platform UI toolkit doesn't fit that description, e.g. Qt apps definitely don't look like they are native outside KDE, GTK outside GTK based DEs/WMs, Java apps don't look native anywhere, nor does Tk, etc. while an Electron app that used native-like UI elements could.

I think on macOS the definition of native is most often “Cocoa” and not the absence of web technologies.

It's a spectrum. My hierarchy for Mac apps goes something like: Cocoa > Java > QT >>> Marzipan > Electron.

On old OS's, Carbon would be between Cocoa and Java. And individual apps can vary a bit. But Electron apps generally feel less foreign than QT apps, which at least makes some attempt to use native Mac elements.

^ I'm past the edit window but noticed a bad typo I need to correct—Electron apps feel more foreign than QT apps, not less!

Of course. However, between the close to sweet f*ck-all support we used to get on Linux for some software vs. a decent enough Electron app, I'll still take Electron. But I admittedly do have some RAM to spare.

Could have at least used Java :(

Eh. Outside Jetbrains' IDEs, I don't remember ever using a Java app that didn't feel like clunky as hell.

They're often better on macOS (assuming the developer put in some amount of effort) because Apple helped design the Mac SWING.

I think that's exactly what 'keep[ing] building the native macOS application as a first-class citizen' means.

Sounds like every announcement of "nothing will change" of any recently acquired company, before the product is shut down and tranformed to something completely different...

Again, this is extrapolation. Until they do it, they didn't.

A dangerous, even if seemlingly cautious, way to approach life and expectations as a user/customer, when there's so much prior experience...

Aka "this time might be different. Let's wait and see...".

I wouldn't put my eggs in that basket.

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