Emlyn MurphyI'm using the Mastodon client Whalebird on the Mac because it's the only Mac app that seems to exist. It's a particularly poor use of Electron though and is slow, buggy, and very frustrating to use. I'm tempted to write my own Mac client but it's not at the top of my list as far as side projects I'd like to work on.
Jeff McLeman@emlyn I use the website in a Fluid container. Better than whalebird. Not native of course.
@jeffmc I use Fluid sometimes but I've never been a fan of the Tweeetdeck interface.
@emlyn Electron is a scourge in the guise of sanctity
@jeffmc I don't mind it in Slack that much but they've obviously put a lot of work into getting it to work well. By the time you do all that, I feel like you could have just implemented it on each platform.
@jeffmc The memory footprint and small non native feeling things will always be a problem though no matter how much work you put into it.
@emlyn agreed. The write once run everywhere strategy, in the effort to be platform neutral, is and always be a bad decision. But when managers tell people that Javascript is as efficient as native, they are either clueless, incompetent, or nefarious. I, still to this day, wonder how one can say an interpretive language is much better than a compiled language and keep a straight face. 35+ years in computer architecture and compilers leads me to just shake my head.
Kevin Mahoney@jeffmc @emlyn "Write once, run everywhere" revitalization in the Javascript era is way worse than the Java one. It's like an era of forgetfulness... people writing nodejs modules attempting to reinvent what GNU already does (like an "rm" module--wtf?). And it's like people are just assuming that nobody is around who does lower level development...which was considered high level when I was in school. For these non-performant apps that show their true colors the second you resize the app window.
Volkan Özçelik@justkevin @jeffmc @emlyn to counter that: sometimes productivity and delivering on time is more important than performance: You can always make a native app after you raise your few million dollars.
So it’s a matter of convenience.
And thanks to Moore’s law, things are getting better. You should have seen how crappy things were 15 years ago
Today: you can play quake using a JS runtime in a browser!
I’m still waiting for the leap in technology where those resize perf issues will be redundant
@volkan @justkevin @jeffmc there’s nothing that makes it inherently faster to write an app in JavaScript. If all you know is JavaScript then you won’t have to learn anything new but someone who knows how to build native apps can build a better app faster using the native tooling.
@emlyn @justkevin @jeffmc
"if all you know is JavaScript then you won’t have to learn anything new" » I totally agree with that: you should aspire to learn new things, and extend beyond your comfort zone.
"if all you know is JavaScript then you won’t have to learn anything new" » I totally agree with that: you should aspire to learn new things, and extend beyond your comfort zone.
@emlyn @justkevin @jeffmc it will not scale.
1 hybrid dev vs 4 native devs.
It is cost optimization; not necessarily perf optimization.
Plus hybrid apps iterate faster. You can hack things.
I am not saying that it is ideal; but if competition is though, and your resources are scarce, then you do it.
Maybe one day progressive web will become mainstream and we won’t have to think about it, and let the native apps do the native stuff, who knows :)