
Introducing Electron Fiddle - rmason
https://medium.com/@felixrieseberg/introducing-electron-fiddle-1de2be1ba6e7
======
Stratoscope
I downloaded this and it looks very interesting. But I'm unable to use it
because of the dark theme.

I'm sorry, it's my fault, at the age of 66 I have visual limitations that make
dark themes very uncomfortable. I just wish developers would not assume that
everyone prefers or is able to use a dark theme. Not all of us can.

To really get comfortable with it, I would also want to be able to select a
proportional font and tabs instead of two-space indents. But that can wait; a
light theme option would be a good start.

~~~
mwcampbell
> I'm sorry, it's my fault

I assume you're being sarcastic here. Accessibility issues like this are
clearly the fault of an industry that hires mostly twenty-somethings with
perfect vision, then doesn't train them in this important area.

And really, why does every app need its own theme or color scheme anyway?
Sure, each company likes having its own brand. But do the _users_ like this? I
think that every app using the OS-supplied theme is good not just for
accessibility, but for a consistent, distraction-free user experience. But
then, I'm visually impaired myself, so that skews my perception, and I
probably don't understand what the sighted masses like.

~~~
DonHopkins
You actually have to pay money to subscribe to Unity3D Pro to get the dark
color scheme -- it's disabled in the free version.

And people actually seem to care passionately about it, on both sides of the
issue, for many different reasons!

[https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/editor-dark-skin-
th...](https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/editor-dark-skin-theme-in-
free-)

[https://forum.unity.com/threads/dark-theme-pro-only-
seriousl...](https://forum.unity.com/threads/dark-theme-pro-only-
seriously.488516/)

~~~
greglindahl
I care passionately that my personal preferences about light/dark shouldn’t be
forced on other people with different preferences.

~~~
DonHopkins
And other people act like pixels are a zero sum game, so when one pixel
lightens, another darkens. And then you have the extremely low contrast people
who want to redistribute all the brightness.

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gitgud
Interesting. But what I think makes; jsFiddle, Glitch and CodePen so popular,
is that you can go to any computer with a browser and run the code, without
installing an environment.

To run this on any machine you would need to download the Electron Fiddle
environment and compile the Electron app binary every time... Very similar to
normal development.

So maybe electron just isn't as convenient for developing, compared to the
browser technologies that the article compares it to...

~~~
chrisshroba
I tend to disagree here. I think a few major things Electron Fiddle will bring
to the table are:

    
    
      - the ability to easily get Electron help on StackOverflow, etc. by sharing the exact code you're running
      - one click (or close to it) examples of every single Electron API (I often find examples jsfiddles to be a much faster way to learn how to use a new API than digging through documentation)
      - possibly making it easier for people who are new to coding to get their feet wet in programming a desktop app without having to open a terminal. This is especially true if they can start with a working app and just tweak small things and see their tweaks reflected in the running app. 
    

All people are different, of course, but my biggest use cases of jsfiddle are
using examples to learn how to use new frameworks. I’m excited to see the same
thing for Electron apps!

~~~
Stratoscope
Readable version of your bullet points:

\- the ability to easily get Electron help on StackOverflow, etc. by sharing
the exact code you're running

\- one click (or close to it) examples of every single Electron API (I often
find examples jsfiddles to be a much faster way to learn how to use a new API
than digging through documentation)

\- possibly making it easier for people who are new to coding to get their
feet wet in programming a desktop app without having to open a terminal. This
is especially true if they can start with a working app and just tweak small
things and see their tweaks reflected in the running app.

(Don't use two space indents to force code style except for code samples.)

~~~
lowboy
Thanks for pasting it as normal text. Code style for textual content is
especially bad on mobile.

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danellis
> Over the past four years, I have introduced thousands of developers to
> Electron.

Then stop it!

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DonHopkins
I see that Electron v3.0.0-beta.4 is available.

What's new in Electron version 3, and how stable is it? Is there a good higher
level summary than the release notes, and could somebody please describe what
are the significant differences between version 2 and version 3, and how far
along and mature is version 3?

~~~
kowdermeister
Took me a few seconds longer to find it than I expected:

[https://electronjs.org/releases](https://electronjs.org/releases)

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tempodox
Several hundred megabytes for not-even-an-IDE is certainly not the world's
tiniest open-source violin.

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Kagerjay
_It does so thanks to electron-forge, allowing you to package your Fiddle as
an app for Windows, macOS, or Linux._

How useful is this feature? I mostly do webdevelopment though.

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matchbok
Great, another way to create huge, slow, bloated "native" apps.

It confuses me that slack, with their hundreds of developers, cannot build a
native piece of software that doesn't require 10+ seconds to init.

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mcbits
The project, minus the blogspam:
[https://github.com/electron/fiddle](https://github.com/electron/fiddle)

~~~
dewey
How is that “blog spam” if it’s the original source? Blog spam is if someone
writes an article about another source to get traffic instead of the original
source imo.

~~~
rootlocus
The content isn't the spam. The decoration around it is (aka the medium
platform).

~~~
Analemma_
I don't particularly like Medium either, but deciding that articles should be
ignored because of the author's choice of hosting platform is silly, as long
as it's not behind a paywall or login wall (e.g. Facebook). If the content can
stand on it's own, who cares how it's hosted?

~~~
severine
Yeah, but Medium is bringing the login wall to my face and asking me, in an
(IMO) obnoxious way, to pass to the other side of the wall, again and again.

No biggie, I guess, but it adds up.

