The gravitational constant is maybe a little low for my taste, but I like that I can fling a block vertically up off the top of the frame and it reappears even 5+ seconds later. Things don't get ignored out of existence. Neat.
I felt that this article didn't provide strong justifications for some of its assertions.
> Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform.
Disagree. I'm most familiar with Windows and Android - but native apps on those platforms, snd also on Mac, look pretty good when using the default tools and libraries. Yes, its possible to use (say) material design and other ux-overkill approaches on native, but thats a choice just like it us for web apps.
And OS vendors are very much incentivised to make natuve development as easy and painless as possible - because lock-in.
> That explains the rise of Electron before LLM times,
Disagree. The "rise of Electron" is due to the economics of skill-set convergence on JS, the ubiquity of the JS/HTML/CSS/Node stack platform, and many junior developers knowing little or nothing else.
As for the rest: minor variations in traffic light positioning and corner radii are topical but hardly indicators of decaying platorms.
The rise of Electron was purely because you can share the codebase for real with the web app (for lots of apps it is their main focus) and get cross-platform support for free.
Native apps are not bad to develop when using Swift or C#, they are nice to use and their UI frameworks are fine, it's just that it requires a separate team. With Electron you need much less, simple as that.
> As for the rest: minor variations in traffic light positioning and corner radii are topical but hardly indicators of decaying platorms.
I think it shows how important the platform itself is to the company. The system settings app on macOS is literally slow to change the topic (the detail page is updated like ~500ms after clicking).
I personally love to develop desktop apps but business-wise they rarely make sense these days.
> Disagree. The "rise of Electron" is due to the ubiquity of the JS/HTML/CSS/Node stack, and many junior developers knowing nothing else.
with all due respect - hard disagree. in what place on Earth to Junior Devs make these types of decisions?? Or decision makers going “we got these Juniors that know JS so it is what is…”
I don't believe they were implying they would make the decision. It's expensive to have your team learn new skills from scratch, and management won't want to pay for that if they don't have to.
I have been coding for 30 years now and I have never encountered a technical decision like choosing technology (e.g. Electron) for anything important to the company being made with "oh, we must use X because so and so knows X"
Maybe if there was a toss-up between X and Y or something like that but to flat-out pick Electron because you have people that knows JS is madness
I'm thirty+ years in too, and it happens all the time - particularly in smaller operations. Resourcing constraints, disinclination to provide training, tight deadlines, etc.
While that's not what the author meant - in all places on Earth where they people grow up and become powerful enough to make those decisions (but also before that , in their own little apps)
Don’t just stand there with your hair turning gray,
soon enough the seas will sink your little island.
So while there is still the illusion of time,
set out for another shore.
No sense packing a bag.
You won’t be able to lift it into your boat.
Give away all your collections.
Take only new seeds and an old stick.
Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail.
Don’t be afraid.
Someone knows you’re coming.
An extra fish has been salted.
by Mona (Sono) Santacroce (1928–1995)
from The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski
Wear OS watches commonly have wifi, and can be programmed with the standard Android API and toolchain/IDEs. I doubt that Google will discontinue Wear OS - although your evaluation of risk will undoubtedly depend on whether you're looking at developing personal or commercial apps.
I'm currently wearing a TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra, which has wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS. I've written personal tools for it, and its fairly painless (and free). As a developer with some background in Android, I enjoyed the experience. Getting apps approved for the app store is a pita though, as Google sets quite high bars for the review process.
I also have a Samsung Galaxy Watch4, which also has wifi. People here speak well of Pebble, which might be an option, but I have no real knowledge of it.
Finally, though, wifi is power-hungry and watches have limited batteries and endurance. Both Wear OS and WatchOS will limit wifi use by apps to conserve power, and you ultimately can't do much about that. Using Bluetooth to a phone, and its much greater wifi capacity, is a common approach.
I posted that comment because your post was not actually asking (or telling) hn anything substantive. You encountered an entirely mundane piece of technology - an ineffective chatbot, which is hardly either new or novel - and basically used Ask to publish a low-effort blog post recounting the encounter. I dont see any attempt to draw anything deeper from what happened.
If this had been posted on a blog, or on x/mastodon/whatever, and submitted to hn in the normal way, then I'm sceptical that it would have been noticed.
But yeah, it got up-votes and my comment was down-voted. I just don't think that's what matters here.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "
The gravitational constant is maybe a little low for my taste, but I like that I can fling a block vertically up off the top of the frame and it reappears even 5+ seconds later. Things don't get ignored out of existence. Neat.
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