From John Gruber’s take on the state of native Mac apps:
In some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is that it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that should have been nothing but good news for the platform — more users means more attention from developers. The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see. The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps — users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right — were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don’t know or don’t care about what makes for a good Mac app.
Fascinating read, all the way through.
Every time I look at the apps section at the Electron site it seems to have doubled. Slack was the breakout app for Electron but I’m seeing a lot of developer tools now.
Are any of them actually good?
Slack is a horrible resource hog.
I tried Atom, which has some interesting ideas. But when I tried to load a large text file, it choked. BBEdit opened the file without a problem. (And so would the BBEdit of 10-15 years ago on a Mac from 10-15 years ago).
Visual Studio Code is also interesting, but when I use it I still get annoyed at all the non-Mac parts.
I’ve often wondered if Electron is anything like Qt in potential: Yes, you could make an app that feels like it’s really native. The potential is there! But nobody has, because it’s easier to shovel shit onto the platform.
I don’t think it would take much effort to make Visual Studio Code feel good. But they’ll never bother.
I’ve used Visual Studio Code off and on but I’ve using JetBrains products for so long that I go back to them after a couple of days. And I like JetBrains products a lot.
I use Slack for work so I use it a lot. I also free up a memory a couple of times a day if I’m using it.
Atom sent me over the deep end. After using it I cracked my knuckles and spent a couple of weeks getting my Vim chops back to speed and still use it.
I tried out Electron to wrap some golang code that I wrote. I worked OK but I get really tired of CSS/HTML in a hurry. I don’t detest all Electron apps like some people (yup they suck up memory). For example, Postman is pretty good even though I prefer Paw for my day to day work.