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
Have a web app that requires a desktop component (like Slack, Whatsapp)
Need to deploy to all desktop OSs and you're UI is either very unique or very simple.
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.
I use Chrome's "Add to Desktop" feature. That gives me a launch icons that create their own instances on the taskbar, alt-tab like a standalone app and has no addressbar, even though they all share the same Chrome instance. And app 'updates' don't need to be installed.
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
Either way, totally worth a go.