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rafram parent
Why does a Mac-only app that shows a menu bar icon and a notification popup need to be Electron…? That’s 30 lines of Swift, max.
ajsnigrutin
1) the dev only had a hammer and he nailed the screw in

2) the dev has 64gigs of ram and a newest CPU and doesn't care about performance issues for people on older computers... that's why you need gigs of ram just to read a weather report online.

jeroenhd
If you don't know Swift, but do know Electron, it's easier to do it in 30 lines of Javascript.

People who don't like the developers work can always write and publish their own application, of course.

whatevaa
It's hard work writing free stuff for others, much easier to criticise stuff instead of getting your hands dirty.
pwdisswordfishz
It's hard work learning programming tools and optimizing, much easier to use a one-size-fits all framework that wastes the end-user's resources.
chipsrafferty
What's the incentive to spend a lot of time to optimize for something you're giving away for free?
nsonha
It's NOT intelectually challenging. Software engineers love to learn new things, but they do not love 10 different syntaxes for displaying stuff. Figure it out.
steviedotboston
I just asked ChatGPT to write a Swift program to renew MAC addresses with a menu bar icon and it had no problem with it. Just over 50 lines.
k4rli
Looks like ai-generated bloat. It even has deps for deb+rpm builds yet is mac only.

Honestly would not expect anything more from js devs who use macs/windows. I see this so often.

eddd-ddde
Those deps are just electron's boilerplate. If you create any new electron app from a starter that's likely what you get.
JimDabell
I’ve asked AI to build macOS menu bar apps and it’s generated perfectly reasonable Swift, nothing like this.
SR2Z
If you want a frontend for you app, you probably just use Electron and get it over with in a few minutes instead of digging through the docs for Qt or some other framework.

Is it worth it? Probably not, since this is a single-platform app to start with, but JS+HTML are easy to theme and customize, and Qt is... not quite as simple.

rafram OP
Where did you get Qt from? This is, again, a Mac-only app that doesn’t even have any windows. It’s just a menu bar icon and a notification. That’s incredibly simple to build with plain old Cocoa and Swift.
anthk
Or AppleScript maybe.
nsonha
Did you forget XCode? How many GBs is it these days?
righthand
No one has to dig through electron docs though right? There is nothing simple about an electron app regardless how little logic you personally programmed on top of it.
juancroldan
Now that you can build such an app with AI in under 20 minutes with a manageable codebase you can properly understand and control, I don't think that's a good excuse anymore
whatevaa
If you don't know the language, how can you properly understand and control it?
therein
In 2025 you unfortunately just vibe with the code nowadays.
paxys
> with a manageable codebase you can properly understand and control

Yeah, that definitely describes every AI codebase I have seen..

outofpaper
People forget to think about Swift let alone tools like Platypus.
encom
Because that's all anyone knows, and PC development is dead.

>content-length: 47262814

Sigh...

thisislife2
It doesn't need to be - on macOS, it could even just as well have been a simple Xbar Plug-In! ( https://xbarapp.com/ ).
rafram OP
Or Alfred script, Raycast plugin, Shortcuts shortcut, shell alias, and the list goes on. There are a lot of decent options; "50+ MB Electron app" is, in my opinion, not one.
palata
Electron is an overkill way to not have to learn how to do stuff properly, if you ask me. And people love not to learn.
WJW
Send in a PR then?
ipaddr
A pr that deletes the repo and bans the person from github?
WJW
No a PR that actually makes the world a better place. Be the change you want to see and all that.
pwdisswordfishz
By deleting the repo and banning the person from GitHub?
gopher_space
Is ActionScript still a thing on Macs? I feel like that tech was almost criminally overlooked while being the backbone for a lot of processing pipelines back in the day.
rafram OP
It (AppleScript) is, and you can actually write JS instead these days, with a criminally underdocumented Objective-C bridge (JXA).
al_borland
I was preparing for the death of AppleScript and was shocked when I stumbled around their addition of JS a few years back. I thought that would have been big enough news to hit my radar when it happened, or that Apple would have made a big deal about it at WWDC. Of course, that would require them to fully support AppleScript in their newer apps, while instead they seem to really only care about Shortcuts, since that’s easier to sell on mobile, I assume.
latexr
> with a criminally underdocumented Objective-C bridge

The documentation is the Objective-C docs, I use those all the time. You do need to understand the basics of how to translate from the Objective-C APIs to what JXA (or AppleScript) expects, but once it clicks you can do it for essentially anything with the same logic.

gopher_space
Ahh thanks! Went down a brief rabbit hole with JXA and had forgotten how opaque Apple is when you're developing for them.
mattl
You mean AppleScript?
WJW (dead)

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