| I'm one of the project maintainers for Electron (not felixrieseberg) and the level of spitefulness in this post and some of Gruber's other recent articles about Electron is really starting to bother me. It's fine for Gruber to dislike software, even to passionately hate it I guess. But this article is borderline conspiracy theory stuff singling out one (very friendly and easy-going!) engineer as the source of all his problems. Can anyone take his claim seriously that one person is the reason the entire industry, from indies to the biggest tech companies, has been building web-based/cross-platform desktop apps for the past 15 years? What's sad is that Gruber and Felix would get along great in real life. I know Gruber doesn't see it this way, but Felix is a knowledgeable Mac developer who has spent a career building successful Mac apps and Mac development tools. As fellow Mac devs, the two of them would be able to get into the weeds about AppKit and Objective-C and the pros and cons of different frameworks and APIs, App Store sandboxing, and so on. Frankly, Gruber needs to chill about this topic and get some perspective. Electron is not an evil plot to destroy everything that is good and pure about the Mac. It's a completely free and independent open source project maintained by a diverse group of developers, often on a volunteer basis outside of our jobs. We have no ill will toward apps that aren't made in Electron, we use other frameworks and tools ourselves. We love desktop apps and supporting the ecosystem, that's what drives us in the first place, and this antagonism is completely one-sided. If Electron is successful it's because it's doing a good job at filling a niche for desktop apps that the platform vendors mostly continue to ignore. It helps that Electron gets regular updates with bug fixes and features, including new macOS integrations, and we provide free support for developers and extensive documentation. Trying to shame people just because they work on the framework or use it to build apps is not going to make alternatives any more appealing. |