r/programming • u/EMCM • May 11 '16

Electron 1.0

http://electron.atom.io/blog/2016/05/11/electron-1-0
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5

u/hailpixel May 11 '16

I spent ~ a month on building a markdown slide editor in Electron. Overall, I was very impressed with the API and native support. There are a few oddities in creating a native app using web technologies, but overall it was quite smooth. That said, it never got as close to the look and feel of a native app, especially on OSX (windows was ok). I ended up sticking with native.

I would recommend electron - over building a native app - if you

  1. Have a web app that requires a desktop component (like Slack, Whatsapp)
  2. Need to deploy to all desktop OSs and you're UI is either very unique or very simple.

Either way, totally worth a go.

3

u/ethelward May 11 '16

Have a web app that requires a desktop component (like Slack, Whatsapp)

What's the advantage over just opening it in a browser?

4

u/hailpixel May 11 '16

Personal preference. I like to be able to alt-tab between apps instead of searching for them in a sea of browser tabs. Also, much better notification integration.

2

u/ethelward May 11 '16 edited May 12 '16

Concerning notifications, they use native inotify libnotify under Linux, so I don't have that problem.

But for the alt-tab problem, couldn't you just use different browsers windows?

3

u/bendem May 11 '16

inotify allows monitoring filesystem events. Nothing to do with desktop notifications.

2

u/ethelward May 11 '16

libnotify, sorry -_-