I keep waiting for Slack to realize that they're a big enough company now that they can afford to make native apps that look and work better than the Electron version. I'd much rather have a real native app than a webpage inside some minimal window chrome. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
The Slack client looks nice but it's incredible how inefficient it is (presumably due to being a web app in an Electron wrapper). I used it recently on a low powered laptop and keystrokes sometimes took 100-300 msec to appear on screen. No other text entry application on that computer had that problem.
It's still going to be a bit of a problem, as you have the Unix terminals (bash, zsh, fish, among others), and then you have the Windows terminals (cmd.exe and PowerShell).
There are benefits to having a pure, native app. Quiver starts literally instantaneously without any lag, partly because it's less than 5MB(!) in size.
Here's a good read from the author: http://yaoganglian.com/2015/11/21/Quiver-3/
Yep. Speaking specifically about developing for OS X only vs. multiplatform, there are big tradeoffs to be made by taking multiplatform options outright. In my eyes, nothing is as great for UI-centric desktop application development as Obj-C/Swift paired with Cocoa/AppKit. It just works so well, and though Qt is probably the best of native multiplatform solutions it’s still not comparable.
Exactly. I used another note taking app, aptly named "Notebooks" (http://www.notebooksapp.com), which is built with Qt. It's cross platform, open data format, and while it sort of looks and feels almost like a native app, it just doesn't compare to a true native app like Quiver.
That's my experience as well. Electron/NW.js is the best option, but 1) it's like designing a website, which can get annoying at times, and 2) the file size :(
I agree on that. Unless you are developing a platform specific utility that is not meaningful in other environments, it is not a good practice to limit yourself. It also makes sense is when you are not creating a product bust just playing with a technology.
Might be a mystery but I'm really glad they keep doing it, because the alternatives are 1) all your data are belong to us, or 2) it looks terrible everywhere.
Or, option C: You use Electron, like Slack.