I hate every Electron app I use, and that includes vscode.
There is a unique type of jank associated with it.
Would love to live in the apparently "bizzaro" world where desktop class apps developed using tools which try to be more native to the OS were still successful in 2024.
Every update to Adobe creative suite makes it more and more close to an electron app and further and further away from it's roots as one of the premiere high end desktop caliber programs. I interpret the rise of Electron to be mostly correlated with the lack of knowledge on how to do old school desktop GUI development among the folks who teach CS education.
I expect that fl studio, photoshop, word, and every other remaining good desktop caliber app will be lost to the "make everything a in web-browser" trend, eventually. I'm so over it and it hasn't happened yet.
This is also the reason why GenAI STILL has no good prosumer tools. ComfyUI/Automatic1111/Forge/lm-studio are the closest we have and they're gradio or electron webapps which indicates that AI folks are not down with leaving the python or JS ecosystem for even a minute.
This means we need good desktop caliber GUI developers who understand AI. Unfortunately, they basically don't exist.
Thus, the world runs SOTA models on janky shit gradio or electron frontends instead of the desktop GUI's we had for similar UIs 10-20 years ago.
Word 2003 was peak software, and I'll never change my mind.
For me the problem with Electron is the “uncanny valley” effect - every app implements its own UI elements, and nothing is quite the same as the OS’s native behaviour.
Different apps have different unique quirks/odd behaviour, almost none of them do the right thing on platforms like macOS.
I do find it sad that native apps were quick and snappy back in the day, but now everything is effectively a browser, and has a DOM that needs to be parsed and dealt with, thus negating the hardware Moore's Law improvements that have happened since.
I used to feel the same way until Apple started dogfooding their ill-performing SwiftUI. The insane hardware packed into M1-3 chips compensates for it a bit (not always), but especially on my Intel mbp it can be jankier than most of the electron apps I interact with regularly. If VSCode was as janky as the "native" Settings app on macos I sure as hell wouldn't use it
There is a unique type of jank associated with it.
Would love to live in the apparently "bizzaro" world where desktop class apps developed using tools which try to be more native to the OS were still successful in 2024.
Every update to Adobe creative suite makes it more and more close to an electron app and further and further away from it's roots as one of the premiere high end desktop caliber programs. I interpret the rise of Electron to be mostly correlated with the lack of knowledge on how to do old school desktop GUI development among the folks who teach CS education.
I expect that fl studio, photoshop, word, and every other remaining good desktop caliber app will be lost to the "make everything a in web-browser" trend, eventually. I'm so over it and it hasn't happened yet.
This is also the reason why GenAI STILL has no good prosumer tools. ComfyUI/Automatic1111/Forge/lm-studio are the closest we have and they're gradio or electron webapps which indicates that AI folks are not down with leaving the python or JS ecosystem for even a minute.
This means we need good desktop caliber GUI developers who understand AI. Unfortunately, they basically don't exist.
Thus, the world runs SOTA models on janky shit gradio or electron frontends instead of the desktop GUI's we had for similar UIs 10-20 years ago.
Word 2003 was peak software, and I'll never change my mind.