A feature request of sorts. An option to reveal and highlight the element the color is for would be cool. There are so many colors and so many elements of the UI that it’s not immediately obvious where it is to properly see the changes I make.
I’d guess it has much more to do with the extra load agentic ai generates. If we take the charts in the OP at face value, do you think gh suddenly exploded in popularity? At this point I think almost everyone who has any use for gh already has an account and use it as much as they ever would. But all the charts go to the moon. Gh obviously didn’t take into account that ai agents can generate a lot of activity they don’t have capacity for.
I feel like this is some sort of butchered metaphor because in a vacuum just picking a color that has no context or effect outside of the experiment framing is really easy. But it’s not that simple if there are some externalities. Say, red guarantees your survival but there’s 50% chance your pet will die. Or every red choice has a 10% flipping one red choice among your friends and family to blue. Now it’s not just a selfish choice but a choice with a known downside. This is a much more interesting game to play. Maybe even a more realistic one.
I agree that there’s chaos everywhere and system integration on individual axes is a better way to look at it but then it turns out that Electron is more native than most GUI libs out there. Browser devs worked very hard and for a long time to integrate with host OSes. Browsers have native text rendering, good accessibility, IME support on all platforms, etc. All these features are usually missing from the hot new UI libs.
ImHex is a great hex editor, lots of features. It’s got antialiased fonts like only a year ago. Fonts still look not exactly as the rest of the OS. Has no accessibility integration at all.
Zed, looks pretty good at first glance. No accessibility.
“Native” implies all the features that the platform provides. It is chaotic on all major platofrms but it’s still meaningful.
How so? It renders to a window buffer using your GPU API and interfaces with your OS for event handling. Electron renders using an embedded browser and uses said browser for input/events. Isn't that quite different?
Why is this still a talking point? So what if the app renders with AppKit or Cairo on macOS, you can both look as native as the other, doesn't the actual UX matter more than how the implementation was made?
> you can both look as native as the other, doesn't the actual UX matter more than how the implementation was made?
An Electron app that draws all its components mostly like the native controls will still not be native and have the same integrations etc. that native apps usually get.
You could get close but some things like for example "ctrl+f" search have native widgets that work different/look different that an electron app realistically won't have. Or for example you will never get the same liquid glass materials that macOS uses in an electron app.
So yea, native in my books means using the platform native (UI) apis. On Ubuntu for examples thats GTK, on Windows its.... idk at this point, WinUI? and on KDE it would be Qt.
You can get all those things in a Rust application drawing with Cairo on macOS, but that isn't "native" according to you regardless, because it's using Cairo instead of AppKit/SwiftUI?
Again I don't understand the obsession with caring so deeply about the implementation, as long as the end results are the same, why it matters so much?
My point is practically you don't get the same results unless you use the native APIs the the platform provides.
Take my Liquid Glass for example, you simply won't be able to match the look in an electron app in practice.
Ofc if the result is the same it doesn't matter how, but in reality it's almost impossible to imitate the look and capabilities since it would require a Herculean effort to keep feature parity.
Right, but you could call native APIs from JavaScript or Java say, then in your world that's a "native" application because it uses the APIs the platform provides, regardless of how it actually was implemented? Meanwhile, an application could be implemented with Objective-C and/or Swift but not use Cacoa/AppKit/SwiftUI APIs, then that's not an native application because it doesn't look like one? Like games written with Vulkan/OpenGL aren't "as native" as one using Metal I'd presume?
you could call native APIs from JavaScript or Java say, then in your world that's a "native" application because it uses the APIs the platform provides
Yes, this is what we want.
an application could be implemented with Objective-C and/or Swift but not use Cacoa/AppKit/SwiftUI APIs, then that's not an native application
Correct. The toolkit matters, not the language. Native toolkits have very rich and subtle behavior that cannot be properly emulated. They also have a lot of features (someone mentioned input methods and accessibility) that wrappers or wannabe toolkits often lack. To get somewhat back on topic I notice and appreciate that Xilem mentions accessibility.
games written with Vulkan/OpenGL aren't "as native"...
Games are usually fullscreen and look nothing like desktop apps anyway so it doesn't matter what API they use.
You can technically get those platform native things by integrating with the native APIs. There's basically a full spectrum from "native" to "custom" rather than it being either-or.
It literally gives me a headache after more than an hour of wearing it. This never happens with may AKG that has a very utilitarian and simple headband—a flat piece of plastic. It’s not pretty but I can wear AKG for a whole day and enjoy every minute of it while I’m phisically sick after an hour of AirPods Pro.
How can you expect adoption of this scale if the AI side is so obviously negative? You might as well label the full AI option “I drown kittens” and go write a long post about how AI users won’t engage with your AI usage disclosure initiative in good faith.
To have any chance of adoption you have to be at least a little strategic. You may think AI is pure evil but you have to make some concessions to AI users to incentivise participation. Try making it sound neutral through out the spectrum, use neutral colour scheme. Yes, you’re not telegraphing your position on AI so obviously any more but you might get some useful information out of others.
This kind of news are about nothing. Tell me in a year, even in 3 months, how your fork has been doing. Clicking Fork on gh and writing a blog post is not a fork. A fork is a lot of work. Color me surprised if this will even keep up with the upstream just filtering out the AI commits.
But more seriously, you can do very little about most of the things listed. Do that little and leave the rest behind.
Tune out of news. Find sources of news that are relevant to you immediately. Like your local community, city council news, your employer, that sort of things. You can’t do anything about war in Iran or wherever, it’s not actionable, stop worrying about it, stop following the news.
Be more offline. Go for walks. Read paper books. Listen to music, preferrably not streamed. Meet real people. Like, talk to a stranger at a coffee shop shop or in a park.
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