Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinaglv | Hacker News Reader

The application is built on Electron. I think that visual editors like Mail Studio are one of the cases where this choice makes sense, since you are editing a live HTML page. You would need some a webview regardless of platform, but Electron makes the implementation easier.

At the moment, we support ESP syncing, which create/update a template on the linked platform. You can then use it as the basis of a campaign.

View on HN

It looks really useful and the rationale behind using Electron makes sense, but I really dislike using non-native macOS apps. Still, I suppose it's better than not being able to run it at all. Good luck with the project!

Honestly using VS Code and Teams every day has convinced me that Electron apps are a net good. It's incredibly convenient that both of those apps work essentially identically on Mac & PC, and the Mac OS apps maintain feature parity with the PC versions.

This is such a nice change, after years and years of bizarro-world Mac apps that have slowly become out-of-date, weird, or slow compared to the PC versions (ahem, Microsoft Office).

Yes, there is a ton of overhead, but this feels like the way of the (near) future for cross-platform software. I'd love to see cross-platform Electron-based versions of apps like OmniOutliner, which is an incredible program that is held back by the lack of a PC version, meaning you can't share outlines or use it professionally.

I can understand the sentiment that they’re a net good but our experiences and workflows with Teams is vastly different.

When I use Teams I have to pretty much close every other open app I have; then I use Teams; then I close Teams and go back to work. If I don’t do this my keystrokes lag by about 2 seconds.

My computer isn’t even that old, it’s from 2016.

Personally I think it would be a tragedy for macOS users if Omni went non native but I suspect we’re going to see more native software in the future not less.

I mean, I've used Teams on a few Macs and never had that problem. I wouldn't assume that applies to every user. Also, millions of people seem to be using VS Code just fine.

I don't assume that it does, but the performance issues with Electron are widely acknowledged, as is the the fact that MS seems to have done a great job with VSC despite that.

Yeah. It sounds like we can at least agree that VS code shows that with enough effort a company can make a performant cross-platform app with a consistent UI and near-perfect feature parity. It's basically cross-platform nirvana.

Why not a web app then?

This is just a guess but if it were a web app then they'd have to support multiple browsers.

But they have to support multiple mail clients anyway: macOS Mail is based on Webkit, Thunderbird on Gecko (Firefox), I guess it's Blink for many Android clients, and then there's a hundred versions of Outlook.

If you spend all your time making the output work cross-platform, I could definitely see not wanting to go on to spend a lot of time working on making the editor cross-platform. It's the same kind of tedium, but without much possibility for code-sharing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com