Re:Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client
by therealdrag0 on Thursday December 19, 2019 @05:34PM
(#21839981)
I like the conceptual separation. I like alt-tabbing to "Slack" not "Chrome". It also doesn't have any of the header bar so the electron app has more UX control, including access to OS level window menu options. Also it can do things that you can't do inside the browser. E.g., I've seen electron apps that come with other background processes. I also think it performs better in terms of versioning/caching resources. So an electron app could be just a web-site, but they often are much more.
Re:Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client
by neop1x on Friday December 20, 2019 @11:36AM
(#21845360)
That's true but some of that could already be implemented in browsers itself. E.g. web page could request to be in a separate window with different icon and ask for OS-wide api permissions. Now we have to run several fully-featured browser (Elecron) instances, not sharing system libraries, under different versions. This reminds me "write once, run everywhere" Java with bundled binary JREs because of incompatibilities between vendors... But there is some progress - for example IBKR TWS client can't play sounds as it was linked with an old libavformat.so which I no longer have in the system. Browsers have most of libs statically linked.
Re:Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client
by CivBase on Thursday December 19, 2019 @11:26PM
(#21841706)
Web pages are constrained by the functionality made available to them by the browser - which is (purposely) very limited. Electron apps run on a native JavaScript interpreter (NodeJS) and have full access to the OS.
As far as UI inconsitencies go, most libraries I have used for native apps (Qt, Swing, Tk, etc) also do not feature UI elements that are consistent with the OS. Many developers simply can't afford to support multiple UIs just because they subjectively look a bit better.
Re:Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client
by yellowapple on Friday December 20, 2019 @04:15PM
(#21847433)
> most libraries I have used for native apps (Qt, Swing, Tk, etc) also do not feature UI elements that are consistent with the OS
Huh? Okay, maybe Swing doesn't support native-looking widgets (I have less experience with it), but I can personally attest that Qt and Tk (or more precisely Ttk) apps nowadays use a platform-native look-and-feel on Windows, macOS, and Linux alike, by default (i.e. with zero effort on the part of the app developer). It might not be absolutely pixel perfect, but it's way closer than an Electron app.
In my experience, Electron applications seldomly follow the UI conventions of the host OS or offer much in terms of integration.
If the desktop app is really just the web site in a locked-down browser, then what benefits does this offer to just the normal web page?