OMG, another electron app that is meant to run as a daemon.
It's terrible. I already have hard times with Slack taking more memory than i would expect from a chat.
Yeah, I know that it's super hard to make native GUI these days, but please if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that.
Examples of good ol' native desktop apps : twitter for OSX.
Wow, some of the comments in this thread are pretty harsh considering the developer has worked hard on providing what looks to me like a pretty cool free app. Nobody is forcing you to install it.
Completely agree. Electron is free, easy to use and doesn't take much effort. Although it isn't the most memory efficient thing in the world, it is great at making really small applications (like this one) which developers can easily make plugins for.
Javascript is probably one of the most common languages, with Node.JS the most common server-side variant of it, allowing so very many people to contribute.
Also, we live in age where we don't have 100MB systems. At the moment the program is using a whole 30MB, which constitutes about 0.4% of my 8GB system.
What if the developer was 16 and this was the first thing they had ever made and they were super proud of being able to get something out the door? Read HN and then never made anything again. That happened to me with music when I was young, so discouraging and missed out on an awesome hobby in my 20s and am thankful I had the courage to pick it back up. The tone some folks take in this community often make me want to leave and never come back. I always hedge towards empathy when I don't know the developer personally.
Oh come on. Half this thread is praise for the app. This one post is about how he picked a terrible technology. He'll live. Best case scenario, he'll even learn a valuable lesson, to not use Electron.
This app took at least many months of work of the developer, who, by the way, is giving it for free. No need to be harsh or disqualify him. IF you dont like it, move on.
There is nothing wrong in using Electron. What if Electron folks release a JRE sort of thing - a one time install that can support multiple Electron apps by sharing the underlying Chromium libraries. At that point we can bring down the app size to couple of mbs at max. And we can keep the same codebase without changing a single line of code.
Regarding memory usage, it is indeed a memory hog and would require at least 100mb of memory per app. The only way we can see an improvement there is the Chromium guys doing some serious tuning to reduce the memory usage(Leakage perhaps?). Also not sure if we can even share the runtime between processes (Like windows dll), if that is possible, then we can hope to even bring the memory usage down.
Instead of forcing developers to learn different programming language and APIs for each operating system, we should as a community think about improving ways to make Electron or something similar even better.
This would be pretty amazing, to have a shared base.
Considering the amount of Electron apps that I've now installed I must have at least a couple of gigabytes dedicated to just hundreds of copies of Chromium.
How ironic is it that if the OP, and those supporting them, had spent some time and not taken the easy route they could have rewritten their entire idea in a constructive way which would have not set off the shit storm occurring on this post...
They could've said it nicer, but i don't think there's a constructive way to say "either rewrite it without electron or start whittling down the electron code-base to remove all the stuff your app doesn't use".
Not true, they could express that very idea and give their reason behind it. Plenty of people agree and use things from Suckless on Arch. Others simply prefer native experiences.
The fact is that it's harder to explain that constructively, but that's kind of ironic coming from people saying the Developer took the easy way out.
The only useful feedback here is "throw it away and start from scratch without chrome". This is however not "constructive feedback". And wrapping it in any layer of nice words won't change its core nature of not being constructive.
A considered statement in measured language about the negative consequences of using electron is one thing. This wasn't that: it's unnecessarily hostile — as if the OP was genuinely inconvenienced or put out by something that doesn't impact them in the least.
Disagreeing with someone isn't the same as shitting on their hard work and good-faith effort to create something useful.
No, we haven't. A bunch of people have used the app (including me) and said nice things about it. Then some other people have spouted vitriol about the fact that it's made with electron. Frankly all we've established is that a lot of people are bitter about electron and don't have the basic manners required to take part in a constructive technology community.
Don't worry about drinchev, it is very common in Bulgaria to point out flaws whenever someone else is doing something, instead of congratulating how awesome the work is. It is not personal, just cultural.
Behaviors contrary to Hacker News's culture are common to many national cultures and most sites on the internet. That does not make them appropriate here.
I know that most people don't know it, no reason to be speechless. But I've been living there for a good part of my life and observed that behaviour time and again. Someone does something awesome, then comes the first feedback, finds a flaw and makes the whole feedback just about that flaw. That's why the country is miserable and everyone is leaving. People don't enxourage eacht other but crizisize each other all day long. Besides that: Wonderful country and people!
It's awesome. Who cares if it takes more memory than someone would expect? That doesn't matter unless you're on a memory constrained system, in which case it's hardly the fault of developers looking to be productive. Electron is here to stay, and it is greatly improving the desktop app ecosystem imo.
> if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that
Electron is the perfect choice. Any web developer can quickly learn to contribute to an electron app. It's far easier to build community around electron apps than native apps, because there are more web developers than any other kind.
I care, because it's a waste of resources, I care because I don't need a daemon written in JS running in a loop sucking up my laptop battery, I care because I like it when my software doesn't randomly get in a loop maxing out a core, I care because I like it when my software is able to push out 60FPS animations.
You know, things Electron doesn't provide.
I get it, HTML+CSS is probably the fastest thing we have for UIs today, and it's not half bad. That doesn't stop software from being absolute crap.
> I get it, HTML+CSS is probably the fastest thing we have for UIs today.
Maybe Racket will come to the rescue soon :) it comes with full gui and graphics libraries, is a much saner language, and is performant (with major perf boosts in the works), cross-platform, has c interop... Optional type system...
>> I like it when my software is able to push out 60FPS animations.
> This is not JS (or Electron) specific either.
Pikzen could be more respectful. But to be fair, it is really reeally hard to make animations smooth all the time with web technologies. I have never seen a web app or Electron app being smooth all the time, on all my hardware. Usually there is some amount of stuttering. I mean, come on, we did 60 fps in the 90s, so even hardware from 10 years ago should be able to achieve 60 fps all the time without breaking a sweat. I know there are hardware accelerated CSS animations but for some reason smooth animations remain hard, e.g. because of garbage collector pauses, accidental relayouts or whatever.
Native UIs tend to fare much better. Though to be fairer still, even they fail at delivering smooth animations all the time (but still succeed more often than web tech). For exmaple macOS Sierra has more animation stutterings on my latest Macbook Pro than OS X Lion from 2008.
Only if you promise to not cut yourself on that edge.
I feel like "want" is a strong word though. I don't exactly believe you've earned any right to get personal information. I'll give you a hint though, it's over 25.
In all seriousness though, when HN lives in a safe space where being told your work is shit isn't accepted, what other answers do I have aside from being snarky?
It's okay to be told your work is shit. It's better when you're told why it's shit, sure. But that's not a judgement on you, as a person. It's about your work. It's shit. And it's fine, no hard feelings. Start over, you'll maybe do it better.
And it is disheartening for the users to have a dozen of electron apps competing for CPU Time or Memory slowing down your PC and draining your battery.
Choosing electron to build an application means you didn't care about those implications either by negligence, ignorance or a combination of both and you can't expect a positive response when you neglect those issues just because you wanted to build something with the minimum possible effort to ship the application as fast as possible.
If we just blindly praised the efforts of people, the end result would be more apps built with electron, and that is abhorrent.
sure native apps would be great, but this guy seems to be doing this in his free time. i doubt he has time to learn and make native apps on all three os's
I can't blame people for trying to build things in what they find introduces the least friction to shipping. With traction, this app could be rewritten as native, supposing it's tenable as a first iteration. I use an Electron app on my Mac that's been open for days and is only using 100MB ram at the moment. RAM is cheaper than time for many folks.
It's terrible. I already have hard times with Slack taking more memory than i would expect from a chat.
Yeah, I know that it's super hard to make native GUI these days, but please if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that.
Examples of good ol' native desktop apps : twitter for OSX.