I know it’s easy to dunk on Electron… but have any of yall written any desktop apps with native frameworks? I wrote a small GTK4+Vala app once and I discovered desktop frameworks are very different than developing webapps. Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.) Web development is waaaaaaaay more friendly towards customization. Which as a company, you want your app to look like your company, not some generic OS bundled app.
And then you have to repeat all that effort for crappleOS and Wangblows?.. And then you gotta hope that it’s even possible to do the thing you want in different OSes. Sheesh.
I mean, I’d be happy if everything was native apps, but I also understand why people don’t tend to choose that route.
Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)
Sometimes all of this is there for a reason. I used to really hate standard Windows (and I still do) but it had one big advantage: everything was accessible, in the sense that it all worked very well for blind and vision-impaired people. Usually when people create their own custom look and feel etc. they never accommodate accessibility at all.
GTK is so shitty to use that they created Vala to make it usable.
it kinda seems you’re not supposed to customize it
This is usually a good thing. More recent native frameworks like Qt QML do work more or less like designing web apps though, if that is what you want to. Qt Widgets itself provides a uniform look on platforms.
And vaguely related: Sciter, a little known but widely used framework that is a few megabytes and is similar to electron for design but very lightweight. Far older than it, too.
Once upon a time, we differentiated our apps based on their capabilities and gave them a consistent interface so people who knew how to use Windows|Linux|MacOS apps would already be familiar with how they operated. Now we differentiate on looks/user experience, and many of them arent capable at all.
People took the wrong lessons from beautiful GUI design. Anyone who felt it was just aesthetics missed the point. It wasn’t just flashy UI on what boils down to a database.
That’s kind of the point of the frameworks though? Electron apps suck not only because of resource footprint, they don’t look and feel native, if they have any accessibility it’s usually custom and different for every program. Too much customization is bad.
I remember the times before UI toolkits took over. These programs had soul and were beautiful in their own way, but you had to learn how UI elements worked in each of them separately. The same thing happens with web apps now. Tab and the other usual keyboard shortcuts rarely work, controls are all custom.
Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)
Sorry but the window real estate of an application isn’t meant for branding and advertisement. For that you have splash screens and the about dialogue, or even the help pages. And for more branding your webpage.
I know it’s easy to dunk on Electron… but have any of yall written any desktop apps with native frameworks? I wrote a small GTK4+Vala app once and I discovered desktop frameworks are very different than developing webapps. Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.) Web development is waaaaaaaay more friendly towards customization. Which as a company, you want your app to look like your company, not some generic OS bundled app.
And then you have to repeat all that effort for crappleOS and Wangblows?.. And then you gotta hope that it’s even possible to do the thing you want in different OSes. Sheesh.
I mean, I’d be happy if everything was native apps, but I also understand why people don’t tend to choose that route.
Sometimes all of this is there for a reason. I used to really hate standard Windows (and I still do) but it had one big advantage: everything was accessible, in the sense that it all worked very well for blind and vision-impaired people. Usually when people create their own custom look and feel etc. they never accommodate accessibility at all.
Honesty Electron is fine as a concept
The problem lies with the implementation. I see no reason why many of these apps couldn’t just be links to a website.
GTK is so shitty to use that they created Vala to make it usable.
This is usually a good thing. More recent native frameworks like Qt QML do work more or less like designing web apps though, if that is what you want to. Qt Widgets itself provides a uniform look on platforms.
And vaguely related: Sciter, a little known but widely used framework that is a few megabytes and is similar to electron for design but very lightweight. Far older than it, too.
Once upon a time, we differentiated our apps based on their capabilities and gave them a consistent interface so people who knew how to use Windows|Linux|MacOS apps would already be familiar with how they operated. Now we differentiate on looks/user experience, and many of them arent capable at all.
People took the wrong lessons from beautiful GUI design. Anyone who felt it was just aesthetics missed the point. It wasn’t just flashy UI on what boils down to a database.
Consistency of UI used to be treasured.
That’s kind of the point of the frameworks though? Electron apps suck not only because of resource footprint, they don’t look and feel native, if they have any accessibility it’s usually custom and different for every program. Too much customization is bad.
I remember the times before UI toolkits took over. These programs had soul and were beautiful in their own way, but you had to learn how UI elements worked in each of them separately. The same thing happens with web apps now. Tab and the other usual keyboard shortcuts rarely work, controls are all custom.
100%, but man these are making me nostalgic.
Then I have a read for you this Sunday: https://www.datagubbe.se/utildisks/
X-Copy with 81 sectors?! What kind of madness is that?
Dated 1993, so probably it deals with some advanced copy protection from impossible sectors? Idk
Holy shit, he figured it out!
So yeah, it turns out that platform human interface guidelines are a thing, and for good reason.
Sorry but the window real estate of an application isn’t meant for branding and advertisement. For that you have splash screens and the about dialogue, or even the help pages. And for more branding your webpage.