
Automatic desktop integrated webapps via Electron - rmason
https://github.com/nylas/electroplate
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StavrosK
Not once during our frenzy of building these wondrous systems higher and
higher did we stop to ask ourselves whether we should.

~~~
tommynicholas
Love this comment and don't want my more serious commentary to override how
good this turn of phrase is.

That said: I think we should. Electron is problematic and you can always tell
an Electron app when you see it because the performance is so terrible.

Still - at some point if you want to build an app that has a UI users interact
with, connects to the internet to get data via HTTP requests, and then stores
some data in a database: at some point you should just be able to write that
no matter where the end delivery will be.

I'm not sure how we're going to get there, but it seems like things like
Electron and React Native will at least be part of the path. Eventually
they'll hit a critical mass of performance and will become the default, then
we'll have to deal with that from there.

~~~
xkxx
> Electron is problematic and you can always tell an Electron app when you see
> it because the performance is so terrible.

Have you tried the open-source Brave browser?

[https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

Its GUI is created with Muon (which is a fork of Electron). The browser
doesn't seem very slow, at least to me.

Also, Firefox have used XUL for a long time to create its interface. XUL is
not much different from what Electron is: XML-like markup to design your
interface and JS to manipulate it.

~~~
StavrosK
> Also, Firefox have used XUL for a long time to create its interface. XUL is
> not much different from what Electron is: XML-like markup to design your
> interface and JS to manipulate it.

Yes, and XUL is terrible too. Firefox is very resource-intensive and quite
slow, and I'm a Firefox user. I wish we could get the values of Firefox with
the performance of Chrome...

~~~
johnny22
but is the poor performance related to XUL? Doubtful.

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gragas
Is there actually _no_ documentation whatsoever?

~~~
rmason
This was just introduced last night at an Electron meetup in SF. It was
something the speaker was working on and shared at the end of his
presentation.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EruDxnLK_bg&t=14m55s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EruDxnLK_bg&t=14m55s)

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bananasbandanas
This seems to basically just create a launcher for a website. When I read the
title I shortly got excited because I looked for something similar a few days
ago but couldn't find anything.

I wanted to create a self-contained package of a webapp [1] (from source) so I
could easily share it with less technically inclined friends. I was sure
something to do this automatically must exist, but it looks like i will just
have to create my own package out of a portable xampp or similar.

[1]
[https://github.com/stockto2/desktophero](https://github.com/stockto2/desktophero)

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jedikv
I would say the only electron app I've seen that isn't a total slug/resource
hog is the Discord desktop app (the mobile app is okay but has some weird
quirks.(

VS Code is pretty ok too - though there is a definite performance gap between
that and something like sublime/notepad++

What I would like is a set of Desktop GUI tools that would work for something
like Go or Rust

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dekz
Is this much different to nativefier? [1] I made previous use of this by
wrapping different AWS console logins (personal, work, prod) so I could be
logged into multiple at once.

[1]:
[https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier](https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier)

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oliveralbertini
can you add some examples on how to use it ?

