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xchip

All was good until I realized it requires:

- Node.js

- Electron (formerly atom-shell)

- React.js

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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I did look at the project, and it didn't mention it was a leaning exercise, then, pointing out that requiring a gig of dependencies is questionable is reasonable.

It's a repetitive trope complaint that is reducible to "I don't like these things". Not liking these things is reasonable but it's bad HN commentary because generic repetition is bad HN commentary.

`Electron (formerly atom-shell)`

This made me laugh. Is there anyone in 2022 who doesn't know what Electron is, but does know about atom-shell?

I came here to comment that exactly. I am not installing anything Electron on any of my machines .. not anymore.

Why's that?

Installation bloat mostly.

I came here to read comments of the token Electron complainers accompanying every thread like this.

At least they have been experimenting with Tauri: https://github.com/martpie/museeks/discussions/639 .

With File System Access API this probably can be a simple web app, no need for wrapper. File support might get shorter, though.

So a web browser engine to play music?

Yes. Just to play music.

I've been working on something similar. It's currently in electron but I'm working on porting it to tauri since I agree that ideally you'd want a music player to be lighter on system resources than electron apps are. So far the tauri version uses a small fraction of the ram and disk space.

https://github.com/milesegan/minimoon

What’s your recommendation for cross-platform app development these days?

Not the guy and I don't have a beef with nodejs et all, but Qt(framework) C#/Python

Has Qt improved its aethetics/appearance? My experience with Qt apps is that they have a distinctive non-native look and feel that's a bit off-putting to me.

Same problem with node / electron though. It generally looks nothing like the native UI, and has a ridiculous memory footprint.

While I prefer native apps, I’m fine with electron and web apps as long as the ui is good to use and to look at.

Some electron apps are great to use, many have terrible UIs. But in my experience all Qt apps are ugly. I was wondering if Qt has been working on improving that.

I'm a bit bewildered by these memory complaints. RAM usage on desktop applications hasn't been an issue for 20ish years. Open up your process manager once in a while.

It is an issue on machines with 2GB of ram or lower.

And there is no good reason we should throw away those perfectly working machines just because devs are lazy waste creators and global warming mothafokers.

What does look like the native UI? I'm not a Mac user so maybe that platform has some uniformity? Windows is a total mish-mash and just about every app and utility for the past 20 years (even MS Office) has had its own "skin". On Linux, Gnome and KDE constantly redesign things, and every distro is different, so there isn't really a standard. The only things I can think of that are consistent are the utilities that come with the DE, but most of the apps I use on Linux are either browsers or IDEs, each with their own style, or console stuff (and even then, the UX varies!)

Lazarus. Native fast compact code that compiles from small ARM boards to big PCs.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

I usually go for the newest (often disappointed to find I was too early). So right now that for me would be .NET MAUI[0] and Flutter.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33523532

Fyne Toolkit

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