Claude's Criminally Bad Electron Mac App Is an Inside Job

21 pointsposted 14 hours ago
by GavinAnderegg
(daringfireball.net)

9 Comments

wiml

13 hours ago

> Windows uses Philips head screws, Linux uses hex screws, and MacOS requires Torx — but a hammer works the same way with all screws. That’s Electron.

Heh.

etothet

12 hours ago

Hate on the Claude desktop app on macOS all you want (I personally think it’s fine), but I don’t understand how Gruber can think the ChatGPT app is that good. It’s also…fine, but certainly not special IMO, despite being a native app.

dzhiurgis

9 hours ago

I have gemini and chatgpt apps - I think gemini is electron app since i can three finger tap to get word definition. Neither can pinch to zoom, print (i.e. to pdf), run extensions, duplicate tab, etc.

Gemini uses 208 mb vs 171 for chatgpt.

jdlshore

8 hours ago

I think it’s incredibly poor form for somebody with the reach and clout of Jon Gruber to be naming and shaming an individual engineer like this. At the very least he could have tried to get the other guy’s side.

jayzer01

2 hours ago

I mainly use mac apps, so I couldn't tell. Is it really that bad?

benoau

13 hours ago

Proprietary platform-specific software has had its day. There are performant electron apps, so a better approach would be for AI to entrench the practices that achieve that and focus on high-quality shared/reusable code rather than end up maintaining and testing Win, Mac, Linux, Web and Android variants expressed in different languages/environments. The only plus side there is iOS bans that nature of software entirely so one less platform to support lmao.

acdha

11 hours ago

It’s not just performance but also quality. There are a ton of things which you get out of a native app which Electron developers who aren’t the VSC team never do. It’s almost always obvious who cared about UX more than portability, but the cost differential usually wins out.

Theoretically AI could help with this by making it easier to support multiple interfaces for the same backend functionality but it would run into the challenge of measuring good taste. A good Mac app has lots of interactive aspects which you notice while using it, and would have to be non-trivial to express in ways which a bot could measure.

rekabis

10 hours ago

> There are performant electron apps

Somehow I don’t think sucking up 300+Mb of RAM to display 15Kb of text is anywhere within the realm of “performant”, especially when a native app can do the same in 1/30,000 as much RAM.

And with RAM prices to spike another 60-80% before the end of the year, Electron apps are a downright moronic and utterly brain-dead choice, to say nothing about failing to read not only the entire room, but an entire stadium filled to capacity. People are desperate to stretch RAM as far as they can, and Electron is the worst possible choice for that.

I would eagerly categorize any greenfield project using Electron as being absolutely retarded. The mentally incapacitated definition. Because that’s what any such decision-makers are.

I mean, if you truly want a write-once, work everywhere platform without any kind of a required runtime, there is DotNet.