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Comment by yarcob | Hacker News Reader

As a somewhat experienced Mac developer, I'm not sure what Electron brings to the table for a project like this.

Why not create a simple Mac app with a web view? AFAIK the overhead of electron is more than 100MB, for an app that could probably be distributed as a ~10MB ZIP archive.

A native Mac app with a web view would also have much less RAM overhead -- and you wouldn't need to worry about updating Electron, since you would just be using frameworks bundled with macOS.

Sure, Electron is theoretically cross-platform. But you are going to need a lot of platform-specific code to package the app for macOS, Windows, or Linux anyway.

Anyway, just my two cents. Maybe Electron is less scary to get started for a web developer. But if you start a project like this, I really recommend giving AppKit and Swift a try. There's lots of examples out there. Native development is easier than you think.

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> Sure, Electron is theoretically cross-platform. But you are going to need a lot of platform-specific code to package the app for macOS, Windows, or Linux anyway.

Not really. The most platform-specific code I've got in my app is 1) the CI install instructions that use brew rather than apt-get [0] and 2) what exists in the application menu [1].

For packaging, electron-packager [2] handles everything else platform specific. So my Windows, Linux, and macOS builds share the exact same script [3]. The result gets zipped and uploaded to the relevant Github release page.

[0] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation/blob/master/.g...

[1] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation/blob/master/de...

[2] https://github.com/electron/electron-packager

[3] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation/blob/master/de...

Have you tried opening your app on a Mac? macOS literally suggests you move it to the trash.

Yeah, it's not signed at the moment. And fair that that's an extra platform-specific step.

Since my audience is developers and this is an early project I'm ok with them having to do the usual right-click Open and Open Anyway flow.

I feel it's a bit disingenuous to tell people how easy packaging Electron apps is when you skip the hard parts.

You can distribute native macOS apps that aren't signed too.

It's a step everyone needs to do regardless of electron or native.

So I don't think there's anything disingenuous here.

You said that you don't need platform specific code, but it turns out that's because you just skip the platform specific stuff, resulting in a product that I would not consider ready to ship.

Maybe because the author wants to target more than 15% of the desktop market?

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

Don't feel bad - I'm writing this on a Linux laptop which has less market share (2%) than "unknown" (8%) on that graph.

I know it is a resource hog but I'm glad Electron is around so that I have access to the latest mainstream apps.

I copy-paster the "installation" code on Github, and it runs fine on my Linux. I doubt you could do that with a native Mac app.

What is even less scary is just to use the Web as is, and let the user keep just his favourite browser.

Would that run on Linux and Windows?

Because he's not just targeting mac. The code for packaging electron for different platforms has already been written.

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