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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.