I think there's a huge market need for good desktop apps, many folks prefer them to online tools. Bonus: It's never been easier to build a cross-platform desktop app.
I know there's a lot of hate in here for Electron, but it truly makes cross-platform desktop app development achievable for small companies and indies.
To answer (my interpretation of) the question, there are still plenty of good native desktop apps for MacOS. I don't have data to back this up but I wonder if Mac users are more willing to pay for native desktop apps than Windows or Linux, which makes it easier for indie devs to support themselves full time writing these niche apps.
All the assets (css, html, js) are bundled in the app, nothing loads from the web, it is truly 'local', and works 100% offline. It's possible to change styles based on what OS you're running on, and there's the full suite of native APIs you can call.
To weigh in on who pays for software -- I'll let you know once I've sold more copies of my paid version, my guess is that more MacOS using individuals pay for apps, but more businesses running Windows pay for bulk licenses.
Maybe Peldi from Balsamiq will weigh in here.
Where do you draw the line exactly?
edit: spelling
UI guidelines from Apple.
If the choice is between an Electron app and no app at all? I would rather the Electron app not lie to my face that it's a real application. No one expects a website in your browser to follow system conventions perfectly or behave like any other app on your system would. That expectation instantly and reasonably changes the moment it has its own application icon and windows, and Electron apps don't give a shit. I would rather not need to have Teams and Slack both installed and chewing up my CPU and GPU at work just because they both decided they're special enough to try and claim all of my resources.
Can you point to the parts of the program (source) that implement such optimizations? I'm curious, in particular, about how other editors solve the performance problems.
At an example, let's look at Dropbox desktop programs. In Windows is made mixing Qt, Python scripts, and native solutions (just have a look at the installation folder), resulting in both a worse performance an a use of RAM.
As a user the underlying technology does not matter to me. I just need to be able to get stuff done without a WiFi or wired connection.
I've litterally done this I'm puzzled myself as to whether I consider it hybrid or native.
I don't have a hate on for Electron apps as such, and use quite a few, but they really are the worst of all worlds, particularly from the security point of view: you have all the ability of an Internet-connected web app to execute arbitrary code, but without any of the work that a full browser puts in to try and sandbox the ability to fuck up your machine.
Personal opinion - this has never been not achievable. It just requires making it a priority.
And it's not as if creating and maintaining an Electron app is somehow free. This "not free" aspect is compounded if you care about making it fit in with the rest of the desktop environment. Which, being fair, most developers (PMs, Managers, Execs) don't, even when their customers do.
One way I think of Electron is that it's fine if it's a primary app I'm using, but when it's a side thing that I have to leave open (Spotify, Slack), it can annoying. I agree that I'd rather native apps for better performance and resource usage, but I understand the developer's plight.
Free Pascal / Lazarus is a FOSS cross-platform language and GUI IDE. I'd recommend trying that in stead.
Found via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19754073 -- Thanks, @DonHopkins!
So does Qt
Also Qt GUIs look like garbage, but it's hard to quantify why.
Sure it is.
>Also Qt GUIs look like garbage, but it's hard to quantify why.
No more garbage-like than you're getting with Electron and just as style-able (with arguable superior layout engines). Qt has a number of style palettes; perhaps you're used to using applications which chose to use non-native/standard palettes.
Learning Qt means figuring out a whole new stack and build chain. Maybe the result would be better, but with only a few hours a week I didn't feel like it would have been worth the time investment.
See for example:
https://nklayman.github.io/vue-cli-plugin-electron-builder/g...
I think the reason you consider the web app publishing pipeline the “regular” pipeline is the reason we’re having this discussion =p
Thanks!
I used to hate native-apps-that-are-actually-web-apps, but I'm a full convert after using VSCode, that's what encouraged me to take the leap with BKS.
Electron is the market leader, so maybe Flutter will end up better, but at this point I'm skeptical.