Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I've been following the scene of Mac gaming for a while. Isaac, the author of this project, is someone who contributes a lot to this space. He created Whisky and contributed to Ryujinx, a Switch emulator that works on Mac, and Playcover, a way to play iOS apps and games on Mac. Also, he's still 17 years old. [0]

[0] https://isaacmarovitz.com/



Hi there, it's been wonderful reading everyone's comments!


This is a tiny detail but boy do I appreciate that he actually bothered to use the real toolkit (AppKit, SwiftUI, whatever) for the GUI… I am so, so tired of projects like Docker Desktop that cram basic UI's into Electron and think that's somehow "fine."

Thank you, Isaac. The details matter.


If you target latest macOS that's an easy choice.


Using AppKit to support older versions of macOS is not particularly difficult.


Electron is probably cheaper to inplement and works - sadly chrome under the hood outgrows it in resource hungriness


AppKit (or swiftui I guess) is fairly simple. IB makes having a correctly behaving UI super easy - far more so than jumping through CSS hoops, and your app will behave correctly on macOS, which electron apps do not.

Electron apps are only easier if you don’t care about good UI, just “cheap cross platform”. It’s even more obnoxious when many of these “apps” can be loaded in safari and then interact properly with the rest of the system.

Electron apps are lowest common denominator apps where the primary goal is cheap rather than good. There is no user facing metric by which an electron app is superior to a native one: they’re slower, bigger, and use vastly more memory, and result in drastically worse battery life.


You get what you pay for, I guess.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: