λ /Applications/Trello.app/Contents ◆ tree -L 2
.
├── Frameworks
│ ├── Electron\ Framework.framework
│ ├── Trello\ Helper\ EH.app
│ ├── Trello\ Helper\ NP.app
│ └── Trello\ Helper.app
├── Info.plist
Tried it. It's a bit laggy and seems not much different than the website itself.I came here to post a comment asking if it was an Electron app. Hopefully Electron's overhead can become lighter in the future making useful applications like this less bloated.
I’ve been a heavy Trello advocate since it launched, but the lack of real native clients puts a pretty low ceiling on it’s usefulness at scale.
Atlassian has plenty of native developers on their team, not sure why they would take this route...
The implementation with Electron, as most cases, sucks.
I work with a startup and they have a hybrid app, which binary is 3.5 megabytes [1]. UI is JS/HTML/CSS and is almost the same bundle as the web version [2]
Trello's app is 66MB [3]
1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ninox-database/id901110441?m...
3: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trello/id1278508951?mt=12
I intentionally do this with Chrome's Tools > More Tools > Add to Desktop > Open as New Window option. Wrapping Spotify Web, Outlook 365 and HipChat into their own "application"s lets me treat them as if they are native apps, but for some reason it uses a lot less resources than the actual native apps.
Because most "actual native apps" now are not native apps but electron or some other HTML + JS + CSS wrapper running an entire separate browser to render the app. By running the web page as separate windows you're effectively getting the same app but sharing the browser overhead.
I really hope this trend stops soon.
In what way? That services stop trying to be desktop applications and live on the web and web browser? Or that Electron itself is not an adequate framework for cross-platform development?
Genuinely curious, is there something I'm missing out on / some way they work better out of the browser?
Maybe I'm missing the key point of a desktop Trello - what does it do that can't be done on a webpage?
Electron is just kids re-discovering MSHTML.dll.
I have seen this twice now; our file transfer service was being hindered by poor file API support by the browsers, so we built a desktop app to wrap the web app and provide better file access. And for a shopping app to get around iframe restrictions.
This app will do that, so I'll seriously think about Trello again.
Trello is also a core part of our workflow (we're custom software developers) and so Cmd/Ctrl + T to open a new tab and type in "tre"...<Enter> to load Trello is basically muscle memory at this point.
All of that is to say, what's the need for a "native" app? I say "native" because it's Electron, which isn't really native per se. But still, why??
It's also pretty darn big though.