[Longhanks]

I think this marks why Hacker News is biased against Electron. I really appreciate your eager to develop desktop applications, but Electron apps are _not_ native. It brings web technologies to the desktop. This is clearly an advantage for web developers, as it, as you just said, lowers the barrier to entry. Custom UIs are in my opinion also much easier to develop using Electron - this is exactly what HTML/CSS/JS were designed for. But these apps don't fit into the operating system. They use few of the available APIs, they are restricted to a common layer of abstraction, which means they can only use features available on Windows/OS X/Linux and none of the platform specific features, they are always "statically linked" (what I mean is every Electron app ships it's own libraries and the whole framework itself), etc.

As you said, Electron clearly has its advantages. But I appreciate the effort when a developer creates an application using the target platform's native language, frameworks and usage patterns (in this case, Swift, AppKit and the Cocoa APIs). The result is, in my opinion, clearly worth the effort and a wonderful piece of software to use.

[sdegutis]

Technically speaking, HTML was designed for reading and sharing scientific documents, CSS was meant for styling documents in minor ways, and JS was slapped on to compete with web "web applets" made by Microsoft and Sun.

[Recurecur]

Technically speaking, none of what you wrote is relevant today. (To pick a major nit, CSS was always meant to be able to re-skin a site completely, hardly "minor".)

Web development has ballooned into a capable, flexible and highly complex beast. It is evolving (understatement) but it can be used to produce very complex apps now, witness the Google productivity apps.

All that said, true native apps provide a superior user experience if done well.