Circuit City on the Edge of Forever

King of Posters
574

Oh, this might actually be an improvement for the Windows app. :thinking:

1 Like
575

:woozy_face:

576

ding ding ding – if you aren’t doing native Cocoa, Electron is actually way nicer to work with cross-platform than old Qt libraries at this point

577

Electron provides “deep system integration” such as “having to build all context menus from scratch and thus not include most of their functionality”

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5 Likes
578

Just saw someone say it uses 200 MB of memory and I know the point is it shouldn’t need to but maybe Macs shouldn’t come with 8GB of RAM anymore

4 Likes
579

Macs can get away with it because they implement swap so much better

pairing a geekbench ~7500 CPU with non-upgradeable 8GB of memory still feels very bad but it’s not as much of an issue for many folks in practice as you’d think

580

1Password 8 runs okay, it’s not a complete nightmare to use. It does, however, use about three and a half times the RAM to provide less than half of the functionality

  • 1Password 7, idle and unlocked, showing the list of items: 117.6 MB
  • 1Password 8 beta, idle and unlocked, showing the list of items: 70.9 MB (Main) + 166.6 MB (Electron GPU) + 99 MB (Electron Renderer) + 31.9 MB (Electron Renderer) + 28.7 MB (Lookup Service) + 9.9 MB (Electron Helper) = 407 MB

Closing the main window reduces this somewhat, but you’ve still got an Electron renderer running resident in the background to provide the “Quick Access” function:

  • 1Password 7, unlocked with main window closed: 77.6 MB
  • 1Password 8, unlocked with main window closed: 74.2 MB (Main) + 130.4 MB (Electron GPU) + 30.4 MB (Lookup Service) + 9.9 MB (Electron Helper) = 244.9 MB

fuck Electron

2 Likes
581

gonna have to get out the “no one cares about unused ram” sandwich boards again

1 Like
582

The alternative here is that they’d continue to make a Cocoa or Catalyst app and use some other GUI for the Windows and Linux versions? The current Windows GUI sucks tbh it’s always hanging for me.

1 Like
583

yeah, this is the tension they face, though, having been held up as excellence in native Mac UIs for their entire existence, despite the Windows UI being notably deficient

1 Like
584

if every process has to use a web renderer now can we at least get to the point where they can share it rather than each shipping one of a dozen bespoke Chromium versions from some time in the last five years? please?

4 Likes
585

congratulations, you have invented AmigaOS

2 Likes
586

I like to think of my TV as a giant Palm Pre

4 Likes
587

I’m pretty forgiving of electron because:

  • at the end of the day, no one really hates javascript anymore, and you can do a lot of fun stuff with it

  • I have made nice electron context menus and tray apps that work cross-platform and while it doesn’t drive you to do this and many devs don’t bother, I actually found the experience pretty good and I didn’t need to maintain nearly as many mac-specific or windows-specific code paths as I have in the past

  • dealing with app notarization makes my willingness to make native mac apps basically nonexistent and I can’t imagine why anyone who isn’t fully ensconsed in the xcode lifestyle should feel any different

  • conversely, it is way more stable and dynamic and involves a lot fewer hinky SDKs that demand ridiculous up-front cognitive investment than any other windows/linux solution that I trust to be around in a few years

  • idle ram usage really doesn’t matter

2 Likes
588

apple and mac users will continue to antagonize anyone who doesn’t make software exclusively for their platform which is like… fine, that’s fine, that’s like the rain, I don’t get mad at the sky for it, it can do whatever it wants

589

User title material lol

It’s really hard to see a future for Cocoa when Apple’s shipping straight-up bad ports from touch screens to trackpads

1 Like
590

by the way if you like me don’t mind making electron apps and you want something that provides an analogous experience for shipping mobile apps these days, I’m quite fond of https://expo.dev/

(react-native platform that doesn’t require you to do low-level platform-specific junk, I expect this recommendation to be shorter-lived but it’s good for now)

1 Like
591

arguments around Mac desktop frameworks are a lot like “socialism in one country” arguments

592

That said the removal of non-subscription options does suck and seems reasonably proximate to the VC funding

1 Like
593

definitely