Your comment snapped me out of the RAM-obliviousness in which I usually live and work. I know memory is plentiful on modern PCs, but 150 MB of RAM for a note-taking app!?
Its a note taking app that renders HTML. Arguably, this is an ideal case for an electron app. 150 MB for a internet connected, syncing, HTML rendering note app doesn't seem unreasonable to me
Markdown generates extremely basic HTML. Browsers twenty years old render Markdown output satisfactorily. This sort of application is the ideal place to use a webview provided by the host operating system.
Anyone can be an armchair quarterback, but this solo developer has made seemingly a great product that people really like.
I don't think it matters very much what underlying frameworks are being used, especially to the end user.
If it's so easy to implement this natively on five platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android), please send us your link to your native cloud-syncing markdown note taking app, I'd really like to see it.
> I don't think it matters very much what underlying frameworks are being used, especially to the end user.
Every Electron text editing app I've used has noticeable input latency and hitching compared to native on my system.
> If it's so easy...
It's practically part of the human experience to have opinions about technology you haven't personally developed. The author can build their software however they want. I just won't use it.
If you have no plans to try this product I wonder why you claim it has performance issues or should have been architected in a different way, and why you're wasting all of our time by vocalising assumptions about an application based on its underlying technology.
I haven't been able to find any other five-platform markdown based note taking app with plugin support and cloud sync, so I'm still awaiting your link to a superior native alternative. It seems like Electron itself specifically enabled this application to exist.
If you can detect the input lag in Visual Studio Code I should commend your superior reflexes and genetic makeup.
> I wonder why you claim it has performance issues
It's true, I haven't tried it. Perhaps this solo dev has succeeded where large teams with more resources have failed.
> I'm still awaiting your link to a superior native alternative
Sorry; I thought you wanted one that I'd written. I've used SimpleNote for years. It's got dozens of clients, many of them native; I use NValt, Resoph Notes, and the official iOS client. It supports markdown. It doesn't support plugins, but you didn't want that until just now.
> If you can detect the input lag in Visual Studio Code
I use VSCode extensively for a large Angular project on a Macbook Pro with a 4K screen. I get trivially reproducible hitching, often when autocomplete kicks in. It doesn't require superhuman senses to see. The console is also easy see lag on; just use it to edit a commit message with vim during a rebase. Character input speed is easier to notice if you've been using Sublime or Vim immediately beforehand. It's not a deal-breaker; VSC is unparalleled for Angular development. I wish it was snappier, though.
> simplenote-electron is the official Simplenote desktop app for Windows and Linux.
I'm only being annoying and flame-war-ish to you about this because I'm somewhat tired of "framework hate." Case in point, you still use VSCode because no better alternative exists for Angular development. So, I still criticize your initial comment where you chose to proclaim that this app that you haven't tried should be written differently, even though it's written the same way as an application you rely on.
It might be interesting to read one Electron developer's take on the issue:
