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It's why popular linux distros are so superior to windoze: very good package management, automatic updates to all software used (unique exception here is http://atom.io/ that I manually update)

Firefox OS was treated more like a project like NodeWebkit or Electron: A sand-boxed browser that calls custom external components that could be more sand-boxed browsers. It was inefficient and a memory hog for the hardware it was being designed for. The failure (misrepresentation?) of Matchstick.tv left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

Its basically a tool for building desktop applications with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. https://electron.atom.io/. Slack, Visual Studio Code, and Github desktop all use it.

It has been done: @mehcode is maintaining a clean fork with additional improvements and no Kite garbage: https://atom.io/packages/minim... https://github.com/mehcode/ato...

For those who use Atom & the minimap plugin, @mehcode is maintaining a clean fork with additional improvements and no Kite garbage: https://atom.io/packages/minim...

A good programming editor has the ability to make 'whitespace' characters visible somehow. IMHO, lack of that feature is one of the criterion for being good or being suitable for programming. (Yes, you can also write War and Peace in notepad.exe if you really have to.)

VIM has 'set list'.

Sublime shows whitespace on selected text.

Atom has the editor.toggle-invisible setting (and lots of packages to add menu option for it.)

Visual Studio has CTRL + R, CTRL + W Menu: Edit -> Advanced -> View White Space

In EMACS you have to write a little lisp code.

At the end of the day this is about as annoying as finding the missing semicolon in ALGOL-style code.

Like Discord for Linux, Skype for Linux Beta is essentially Skype for Web wrapped in Electron, which is a special-purpose web browser using Blink (the engine of Chrome) specialized for one site at a time.

While some frameworks can use CSS for styling or even HTML for layout they only partially use of javascript for event handling, I think the lesson here should be clear: never go full javascript.

As RAM capacities increase, software becomes inefficient to compensate rather than allowing use of more applications at once.

Like Discord for Linux, Skype for Linux Beta is essentially Skype for Web wrapped in Electron, which is a special-purpose web browser using Blink (the engine of Chrome) specialized for one site at a time. In my tests, it has the same RAM footprint as running a second web browser. Having the equivalent of several 100+ MB web browsers running at once, one for Skype, one for Discord, etc., adds up quickly for people stuck on a machine with 2 GB of RAM, such as my laptop with one RAM slot that cannot use modules larger than 2 GB.

In addition, Skype for Linux Beta requires more vertical scrolling than Skype for Linux 4.3 because the "bubble" around each message in Skype for Linux Beta takes a lot more vertical space than the more IRC-style message list in Skype for Linux 4.3.

So what's the alternative? Setting up a VPS and running your own IRC or XMPP server and requiring all your contacts install an IRC or XMPP client with which to continue to communicate with you?

Captain Obvious strikes again?

The OS then would be the specific featureset. Stuff like this happens already. In professional web development it's almost academic which OS you use on your desktop for development. Apart from some neat platform specific tools like Kaleidoscope, CodeKit, etc. that might tender to specific preferences of certain developers it's just about of nil significance which OS you use.

macOS has a neat for-money FTP client called Transmit, Linux usually has it integrated into the Filemanager.

But Atom, Geany, NetBeans, PhpStorm and so forth including local AMP or other devstacks Stacks run just about the same on all desktop OSes. ... OK, BSD might have some trouble getting some to run.

The OS is all about what you prefer at certain fringes of your work. If that's the case, that is a good reason to move to a FOSS OS btw. Which is why I moved from macOS back to Linux after 12 years and got a new 300 Euro netbook rather than the new 2300 Euro MB Pro - although I do like the massive trackpad and the keyboard - neat hardware from apple once again - no doubt.

My 2 cents.

And yet none of those succeeded (set top boxes, email, etc) or are being done today (embedding an html 5 rendering engine into an app - which btw also violates Apple's terms of "no interpreters").

Wow, there are so many incorrect statements in this sentence it's hard to know where to begin...

No Flash-based STBs/TVs succeeded? Many Vizio Smart TVs and BD Players, several cable STBs, as well as some other brands from circa 2009-2014 used embedded Flash for significant parts of their UI.

And no one is embedding an HTML5 rendering engine into an app? Are you fucking kidding me? First, Apple (iOS - since they have no control over Macs, obviously): what do you think a WebView is? And second, everyone else (since WTH does iOS really have to do with this discussion): there are literally hundreds of millions of TVs, STBs, and BD/DVD players that embed HTML5 engines. All Samsung TVs in the past 5 years and LG TVs in the last 3 years have done this. And there are thousands of apps on PCs/Macs that do the same.

Here's one popular framework used by a ton of PC apps: http://electron.atom.io/

It's pretty amusing how definitive you are about everything you state while obviously knowing nothing about the field...

Who on earth would choose Javascript for server-side code?

It's not only serverside either, it's now possible to make fullblown desktop applications using mostly javascript/HTML/CSS with Atom. Atom basicaly is chromium + node.

http://electron.atom.io/

It's picking up pace and the programs written in this feels modern, like the web. It's extremely flexible compared to any existing widget toolset out there. And the applications written are fast. I''ve used it for quite a large project and to me this is what Java promised 20 years ago regarding write once/run everywhere, pixel perfect. I will probably never use a native toolset for a larger project again, too much hassle compared to some HTML/CSS/Javascript. V8 is fast enough for most code and performance code or platform specific features can be written in a compiled language. Mutliplatform is not free but very close.

OK, let's see:

http://komodoide.com/komodo-ed...
https://www.sublimetext.com/
https://code.visualstudio.com/
https://atom.io/
https://panic.com/coda/ (nice example of low-contrast website as well)
https://www.jetbrains.com/webs...

That was pretty fucking easy.

If you want more examples then just type something like "best text editor" into google images and weep at the acres of grey-on-grey images that appear.

Here, let me do it for you seeing as how you're a bit out of the loop: https://encrypted.google.com/s...

That is because the Slack client literally is Google Chrome.

It actually uses Electron, not NWJS.

Nice.

For comparison, I recently heard about Atom (http://atom.io/) and decided to try it out. Just after starting it consumes 190 MB with no files open and a single project folder added. After a while of use it typically eats around 600 MB. For a fairly simple text editor that only does a tiny subset of what Emacs does. Jesus.

Electron has made great strides in 2015 and is seeing some very active development lately. From the success of the Atom editor and Microsofts Visual Studio Code, there are many very professional tools built on this framework. In my view, it should be voted up as one of the most important projects of the last year for cross platform desktop application development.

My hope for the next couple of years is to see a fork of electron for mobile so we can start building cross platform mobile apps based on node.js and chromium.

For old school JavaScript developers like myself, the Electron project are of stuff dreams are made of.

In my opinion Firefox OS is the only thing that stands between us and the enternal rule of giant Megacorps in the mobile space. It get's way to little attention and not enough support. Jolla is struggling to survive and last their OS wasn't fully FOSS and the Ubuntu Phones are not approachable as a plattform. A FOSS web-centric mobile OS is a truely feasible thing. If I had the time and resources, I'd build a kickstarter prototype for a high-end Firefox OS phone.

systemd get's the credit for raising hell amoung the FOSS crowd. Couldn't say I particulalry like or hate it, but the attention it has gotten definitely make it the most talked about project.

Blender gets far to little credit.

Atom and Electron are both neat too. ... Love that video-ad for Atom. :-) ... I like Atom for the hippster vibe it brings to FOSS with UIs and usability that don't look or feel dated. ... It does still have some issues though. :-) And, btw., unlike .Net Atom did start off as a true FOSS project done by GitHub. These folks put their money where their mouth is - unlike some other folks in the industry.

In my opinion Firefox OS is the only thing that stands between us and the enternal rule of giant Megacorps in the mobile space. It get's way to little attention and not enough support. Jolla is struggling to survive and last their OS wasn't fully FOSS and the Ubuntu Phones are not approachable as a plattform. A FOSS web-centric mobile OS is a truely feasible thing. If I had the time and resources, I'd build a kickstarter prototype for a high-end Firefox OS phone.

systemd get's the credit for raising hell amoung the FOSS crowd. Couldn't say I particulalry like or hate it, but the attention it has gotten definitely make it the most talked about project.

Blender gets far to little credit.

Atom and Electron are both neat too. ... Love that video-ad for Atom. :-) ... I like Atom for the hippster vibe it brings to FOSS with UIs and usability that don't look or feel dated. ... It does still have some issues though. :-) And, btw., unlike .Net Atom did start off as a true FOSS project done by GitHub. These folks put their money where their mouth is - unlike some other folks in the industry.

Seems your information from 2014 is not relevant any more, supposedly they open sourced all of it in May this year:

http://blog.atom.io/2014/05/06...

My preferred general purpose C++ solution would be to use Qt when possible. It already has virtually everything you would use in an operating system with baseline networking, GUI, etc. already wrapped for cross-platform use in a clean, powerful way.

If you are writing a utility or a service, there are other choices. If you think you need the widest range of features, you might need a native GUI, GPU access, etc., Qt is the only real choice.

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, Node with C++ modules provides a nice base. It is even used as the basis for desktop apps with web-based GUIs (see Atom editor https://atom.io/ .) You get Javascript scripting, full web server capability, WebSockets for bidirectional communication, etc. Nginx is another possibility for something like that.

You could use Java or C# for portable-ish apps. In some ways, Qt seems even more portable now, especially for GUI and OS-specific features. Java and C# also don't make for great UI without a lot of work, and then it tends to be sluggish. For UIs, you want either a modern web UI, or a well-designed Qt UI. Interestingly, Qt includes a modern web capability embedded. Even the native Qt GUI is styled using CSS.

For a pure server app, Java, Node (Javascript), Python (according to many), and C++ are good. PHP, because Facebook has improved it, may be OK. Perl, Ruby/Rails, Drupal, WordPress, etc. all seem to be fading for app framework use because of developments in Javascript libraries. WebComponents / Polymer SPAs are very interesting.

The editors are barely online anymore. Most of the work is happening in your local browser, driven by Javascript code. Some people have even started breaking those layers completely apart to where you don't need the remote component at all, like the Atom editor.

The main benefit of using a browser hosted editor is that you don't have to install (and maintain, and update, etc.) a dedicated editor/word processor. You just go to the possibly local web page that the editor is hosted at.

When you store your document in the cloud, the main benefits are automatic off-site backups, documents you can reach from anywhere, and collaborative editing (again, without installing any additional software for it). More fundamentally, you don't have to figure out how to convey the document to the other person. No more e-mailing documents around and then having to e-mail again after each update. Just share a link to it instead, and people will always come to the latest version.

It does, actually: http://blog.atom.io/

Here is a link to the actual website:

https://atom.io/

ps: it's only available for Macs

Maybe it's the past year getting to me, but I'm wary of a text editor that phones home. https://atom.io/faq

Why do they need a GUI toolkit at all? Why don't they build the Chrome UI in HTML/JS/CSS?

I wish I had funny mod points!

Yeah.

Really funny

Of all the whoooshhhes I've seen ... this is the biggest.

Yeah.

Really funny