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by bromuro 120 days ago
We should repeat it over and over until all these electrons apps are replaced by proper native apps. It’s not just performance: they look like patched websites, have inconsistent style and bad usability, and packed with bugs that are already solved since tens of years in our OS. It’s like Active Desktop ™ all over. Working on a native Mac app feels just better.
3 comments
rumori 118 days ago
I rarely feel that any more, especially with the latest liquid glass updates. I used to work on high profile native apps, but embraced Elektron after Figma destroyed Sketch, the supposedly superior native alternative. Electron apps run fine on my 4 years old M2Max 32gb Macbook Pro, I never really experience any problems running Notion, Figma, VScode and Linear side by side. I enjoy being able to resize text in all of these apps like you do on any website, or being able to select text across different UI elements and blocks. Web content has a built in level of accessibility that is really hard for native apps to implement.
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rc1 120 days ago
> have inconsistent style

You mean incongruent styles? As in, incongruent to the host OS.

There is no doubt electron apps allow the style to be consistent across platforms.

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bromuro 120 days ago
No, they are also inconsistent: slack, vscode, zed, claude, chatgpt, figma, notion, zoom, docker desktop, to quote some that i use daily. They have all different UI patterns and design. The only thing they have in common is that are slow, laggy, difficult to use and don’t respond quickly to the Window manager.

Compare to other software on Mac such as Pages, Xcode, Tower, Transmission, Pixelmator, mp3tag, Table plus, Postico, Paw, Handbrake etc, (the other i use) etc those are a delight to work with and give me the computing experience I was looking for buying a Mac.

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bilalq 120 days ago
XCode and Pages are a delight in comparison to VSCode and Notion is certainly one of the takes of all time.

XCode is usually the first example that comes to mind of a terrible native app in comparison to the much nicer VSCode.

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rc1 118 days ago
You missed my point. Electron apps are incongruent to native OS apps.

Electron apps look the same on each platform therefore they are consistent.

The meta point is the effort required to be consistent with the OS.

You listed MacOS only apps, emphasising the point.

To do a per OS consistent experience is N times the effort.

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llbbdd 119 days ago
How much is Linus paying you?
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