Is Electron a temporary thing until Apple improves SwiftUI on macOS?
Interesting question from Jason Snell in episode 366 of the Upgrade podcast on Relay FM:
Is using Electron on macOS a temporary thing until Apple has improved SwiftUI on macOS?
If so, how long do you think we have to cope with the Electron App on macOS?
Comments
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I think the only way that's going to happen is if Apple matures SwiftUI to the point that it would be easier for developers to use it than to port the Windows version to the Mac (which, let's be honest, that's what the Electron version really is). I'd say that's at least a couple years off, if ever. By that time 1Password will have invested quite a bit into the Windows port, and I highly doubt there will be enough financial incentive for them to make the move. When you owe investors millions of dollars, it's all about the bottom line. Quality and craftsmanship have to take a back seat to growth.
Personally, I'm exporting all 1,325 items in my 1P database and I'll be importing them one by one as needed into the new Monterey password manager. Work decided months ago to use LastPass, it was just my team sticking with 1Password because, as I kept arguing with IT, over and over, 1Password was the best. Was. Now I've got to eat some humble pie and recommend my team go with the rest of the company and move to LastPass with everyone else.
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@XIII We are trying to build the best experience possible with the tools we have today. 1Password desktop app was rewritten from scratch several times and if there is a better technology with clear advantages available tomorrow, we will be there to adopt it.
We argue the differences between AppKit, SwiftUI, Catalyst, Electron, Tauri, etc but it is also a very low-level discussion in many ways. It is very important for us to make 1Password better as a product: add features that were on the back-burner for years, make it easier to new users, make it more powerful for advanced users, support both individual/family and business customers, try to not break existing workflows that people had for years and at the same time also create new better ones.
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We are trying to build the best experience possible with the tools we have today.
Well… sort of? If building the best Mac experience were your goal, why port over the Windows version? The goal was to unify the platform codebases. Hence the Windows port. I believe you are all trying your best with the toolset you've chosen. That's a different statement from building the best experience with what's available.
Ah well… so it goes. I evangelized for you, I upgraded, subscribed at home and at work, and I trusted 1Password with my most important information. And now it's all this. I joined this forum to help make a difference for 1P8, but I no longer believe that's going to happen. The tone (and let's be honest, snark) of my posts has steadily decreased to the point where it's no longer good for me or for you. Best of luck, hope it's worth it.
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If building the best Mac experience were your goal, why port over the Windows version?
Because with the amount of work that went into Linux and Windows, it is much better experience than anything else we provide. If you keep an open mind and look at the product that people, it is a better product.
Just like people prefer Slack to HipChat it is often not the minute details that make a difference but the overall experience.
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It is very important for us to make 1Password better as a product: add features that were on the back-burner for years, make it easier to new users, make it more powerful for advanced users, support both individual/family and business customers, try to not break existing workflows that people had for years and at the same time also create new better ones.
I find it hard to have an open mind here (but I'm trying!): version 8 is breaking a lot of my workflows and I have not seen a single new thing that I got excited about.
Still, I have v8 installed and hope your team can convince me to not revert to v7.
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Just like people prefer Slack to HipChat it is often not the minute details that make a difference but the overall experience.
Terrible analogy. Slack is a horrible, horrible experience, the poster child for open protocols that let people use whatever client they want being replaced by horrible proprietary webapps where the app maker owns your data. HipChat sucked too but at least it wasn't slack.
I understand that the SwiftUI thing didn't work out but why throw out something you had that was good for something else that by all accounts is dramatically worse? Would it really be that much extra work to keep maintaining the AppKit version until SwiftUI is more mature? You claim to want to create the best possible experience, it's pretty obvious at this point that you're not going to achieve that with an electron app.
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This is not in any way the best experience ever. It can’t be unless the Mac app looks and feels like a real Mac app. To say nothing of its resources hogging for what should be a small background app.
In 1Password 8, you can't move the preferences window around — that is not how Mac software is supposed to work.
In 1Password 8, the close button for the preferences window is on the right — that is now how Mac software is supposed to work.
In 1Password 8, the menubar, which should be the hub from which you can do anything you need to do in an app, has been completely neutered to the point that you can't even create a new item from it — that is not how Mac software is supposed to work.
In 1Password 8, you now create new items from a drop down menu inside the window, but that menu isn't a real menu and if the window is too small it cuts off and you have to scroll the blasted menu — that is not how Mac software is supposed to work.
In 1Password 8, collapsing and expanding sidebar items is not animated, it just happens — that is not how Mac software is supposed to work.
In 1Password 8, drag and drop appears badly broken in the same way its broken in all Electron apps — that is not how Mac software is supposed to work.
In 1Password 8, the user cannot change or add shortcuts for menubar commands (what paltry few there are) — that is not how Mac software is supposed to work. Worse, your app steals important shortcuts used by apps like Pages.
Will any of these things, and the dozens of other foreign behaviors and UI weirdness, be fixed before the final release? I doubt it, because these are all elements that come directly from your decision to use the garbage that is Electron.
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Great list of very real examples of the least-common-denominator UX that is any cross-platform framework. Those apps look like that framework, not the native platform apps. The UX is always substandard.
At what point does the amount of code required to work around the framework limitations exceed the cost of just building a native app, let alone lost business?
My informal survey of coworkers who use 1P is that at least half will drop it over electron. Slack is using ~750MB of RAM at the moment, and Signal using another 450. 1P7 is using ~200.
That realization just made me drop one of those. The other I have to use for work. The third? Well, it has a lot of competitors.....
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Agreed, this is a great list of the sort of death-by-a-thousand-cuts user experience that one gets with an Electron-based app as compared to a native app. Especially regarding window/menu behavior and drag and drop- since those are the aspects of the UI that really determine whether an app "feels" native or not, and (perhaps not coincidentally) don't appear in screenshots or mockups.
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Oh, another item to add to the list, sort of the sloppy UI stuff that is common in Windows and Linux but a real eyesore on the Mac… many pop up menu items are in “Sentence case” instead of proper “Title Case”.
Whoever designed this UI didn’t give a moment’s thought to what a Mac UI should be like, because they didn’t care about the Mac.
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Nearly all of the arguments have been made in several threads, thus I'll refrain from repeating them. A long time user for personal, family and work I was able to tolerate the move to the subscription model in return for quality software that fulfilled my needs and worked seamlessly. Dropping the native Mac Client as well as the local vault option however are not acceptable to me. Unless this is reconsidered, I will be cancelling all my subscriptions and migrate to alternatives.
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