But Flash games were a boon. Everyone with an idea was able to make it into a game. I spent a lot of time playing games in Kongregate and similar sites. Many were really interesting, well worth the effort of sifting through the rip-offs and trash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeKX2bNP7QM
The internet speeds were much slower then, the difference mattered a lot. Also note, from the description:
"Sadly, it's not possible to replicate the pop-up mouse-overs from the "Special Edition" - though I was able to append the "deleted scene" presented in that version. If you want to see that version - or the "Fire BAD!" flash video game where you attempt to extinguish flames on James Hetfield (tragedy + time = humor), you'll have to find the original .SWF files and have a way to play them."
Spend time watching some of each year's WWDC talks and noting how much effort Apple engineers give to fine-tune certain APIs to enable app developers to optimize battery use, disk access, or graphics rendering. State-of the art stuff. And then your Electron app just ignores all of that.
Manually targeting multiple platforms is really hard. How could one person possibly keep track of all the battery-saving API changes in OSX, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Android?
Yeah, it's annoying that Electron apps are so bloated. But the alternative would be > 50% of people can't use those apps at all because you only targeted one platform.
Which I tend to do, particularly since that "one platform" is almost always either Windows or macOS, neither of which I use on a daily basis (and neither of which I have any desire to use on a daily basis).
Meanwhile, there's such a thing as cross-platform GUI applications that don't try to fit an entire web browser into them. Especially if your programming language of choice doesn't require precompilation, frameworks/toolkits like Qt and GTK and Tk are perfectly viable for cross-platform development, at least on the desktop (which is usually where folks are using the likes of Electron or CEF anyway). They also tend to perform significantly better and stay much closer to the look-and-feel of the rest of the operating system (no, I don't care if you think you know better than me about my sense of style; if your app doesn't respect the look-and-feel of the rest of my system, then it sticks out like mold on a slice of Wonder Bread).
I don't think any of them target HTML/JS, though.
You don't. You just use system-provided APIs and get the improvements for free whenever the system frameworks are updated to be more efficient.
I'm not saying everything should be Electron, but it certainly has usecases just like native does.
But what's your game plan under other circumstances? Do nothing?
Just because an enterprise has funding doesn't mean it's wealthy in other, more scarce things like organizational capital. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if all the client developers at Slack would love to split off into dedicated platform teams and do a rewrite. We as developers love that shit.
But you should try to understand why these enterprises make these trade-offs and why they are still in these positions in spite of how much disposable money you think they have.
Electron wrappers for originally web apps, on the other hand, are usually horrible user experiences—often they don’t even support right-clicking elements, or clicking on links to open them in a browser.
No, they don't. Ever tried to drag and drop into an Electron app? How about used VoiceOver?
I don't think more than a handful of the games and little videos that I enjoyed as a kid on newgrounds and addicting games would have been made had they not had such a low barrier to creation.
I do kernel/firmware development now, so I'll be the first to admit that this value proposition isn't valid for all domains. But sometimes, for some use cases, just having a simple to use scripting environment is totally the way to go. Particularly if it's sandboxed well and can't really harm the end user.
Flash for the win! Till the day I die.
AS3 was amazing. When Typescript came out, it was a lot like AS3. I was convinced and became a believer in TS and never looked back.
In those days there was no notion of SPA or other contemporary well-established patterns for online interaction.
I authored several commercial sites using Shockwave and the like and it enabled us to give clients the ability to author media-rich and design-heavy presentations in a fashion they were familiar with from card decks applications. At the time doing so in a 'sexy' way made them stand out.
It was a cul de sac, but it was a worthwhile direction to test in terms of UX.
That it was proprietary was weighted differently in those days. The world was dominated by closed standards and open source was still vestigial especially in commercial applications.
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actions...