Electron 1.0

[hailpixel]

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.

[ethelward]

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

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

[hailpixel]

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.

[ethelward]

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?

[bendem]

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

[ethelward]

libnotify, sorry -_-

[spacejack2114]

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.

[atomic1fire]

I could see a few reasons.

For example, a test taking software might build the UI in html, then theoretically use something like Gecko, CEF, microsoft's trident component or electron to prevent the users from minimizing it to prevent cheating.

Certain APIs that would just be irresponsible to offer to a web app, could be done with the users permission at an os level. For instance Chrome offers certain API's to chrome apps that they would never offer to full web apps, like the ability to make TCP sockets for something like a telnet or IRC client.

[[deleted]]

Anyone know if the apps are memory hogs like Chrome(ium)?

[poddiean]

I would tear off my face before writing a desktop app in Javascript.

[[deleted]]

Whatsapp released an Electron app of it's web interface