An unofficial WWDC app for OS X(github.com) |
An unofficial WWDC app for OS X(github.com) |
A well defined interface, designed specifically for the platform the author targeted. Major props to the author!
The ability to create reasonably good-looking cross-platform desktop applications using Node.js. Obviously Electron is not much use to you if you're already experienced in the native development kit of your platform, but if your main expertise is Node.js (which is the case for an increasing number of developers), Electron is quite handy.
I've never used it, but it sounds potentially great for people who do a lot of web development. It's a frictionless way for them to share code and other assets between native(isher) desktop apps and web projects. For web developers who don't do desktop development at all, it's also a relatively frictionless way to ship a desktop app.
If you don't need a cross-platform UI toolkit, and/or don't need to (or want to) use web technologies in a desktop app, it wouldn't be a net positive. Obviously there are downsides in terms of performance and not having a native UI. The upsides depend on your requirements, which range from 0 to >= the downsides.
I certainly see the point and some use cases for Electron, however I dislike the recent trend of reinventing the wheel of every application using Electron.
[1] https://webtorrent.io/desktop
I can imagine it feels worse in older hardware. For an app meant to be used only in one OS, it makes more sense to just go native.
Apple could do this very well, it makes sense from a business perspective, and from a technical perspective, it shouldn't be hard.
I thought that was some "funny" ancient app with technology from way back when. I know nothing about the Apple ecosystem and did not really read much of the text, but that screenshot did kind of look like the past.
"The app has a powerful search feature. When you first launch the app, It indexes the videos database and downloads transcripts from ASCIIWWDC, so when you search, not only will you get search results from session titles and descriptions, but also from what the presenter said in the sessions."
And was all pissed off.
"Damnit, Apple, how about you do something similar for the App Store?!?"
Then I realized...
Genuinely useful both for past WWDC videos and (presumably) for keeping up to date next week. Love the ability to search text within the talks.
I'd really like a shared library version of Electron but it's never going to happen.
Now I have the opportunity to do what I actually wanted to do.
As you said, Electron clearly has its advantages. But I appreciate the effort when a developer creates an application using the target platform's native language, frameworks and usage patterns (in this case, Swift, AppKit and the Cocoa APIs). The result is, in my opinion, clearly worth the effort and a wonderful piece of software to use.
That sort of gets to how I feel about Electron apps. If you don't like Electron apps, then just pretend any app made with it isn't available for your platform, as would likely be the case if they were not using a cross-platform library.
There is always the Qt5 option, although I'd be curious to see how much overhead (latency, battery consumption, etc) Qt brings over a program built directly in Cocoa.
Web development has ballooned into a capable, flexible and highly complex beast. It is evolving (understatement) but it can be used to produce very complex apps now, witness the Google productivity apps.
All that said, true native apps provide a superior user experience if done well.