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Electron vs MacGap: What are the differences?
Developers describe Electron as "Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies. Formerly known as Atom Shell, made by GitHub". With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor. On the other hand, MacGap is detailed as "Desktop WebKit wrapper for HTML/CSS/JS applications". MacGap provides HTML/JS/CSS developers an Xcode project for developing native OS X App. These Apps run in OS X's WebView and take advantage of WebKit technologies. MacGap exposes a JavaScript API for OS X integration, such as displaying native notifications or writing data to a file. MacGap is extremely lightweight and nimble; a blank application weighs less than 1MB.
Electron and MacGap can be primarily classified as "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" tools.
Some of the features offered by Electron are:
- Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.
- Electron is open source
- maintained by GitHub and an active community.
On the other hand, MacGap provides the following key features:
- open-source
- tiny compiled app sizes
- Mac App Store compatible
"Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications" is the top reason why over 50 developers like Electron, while over 2 developers mention "Remember that Mac app you always wanted to create... ?" as the leading cause for choosing MacGap.
Electron and MacGap are both open source tools. It seems that Electron with 74.9K GitHub stars and 9.8K forks on GitHub has more adoption than MacGap with 3.59K GitHub stars and 226 GitHub forks.
Pros of Electron
- Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications66
- Open source50
- Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code12
- Because it's cross platform6
- Use Node.js in the Main Process3
Pros of MacGap
- Remember that Mac app you always wanted to create... ?3
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Cons of Electron
- Uses a lot of memory17
- User experience never as good as a native app8
- No proper documentation4
- Does not native4
- Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs1
- Wrong reference for dom inspection1
Cons of MacGap
- Only for Mac2
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What is Electron?
What is MacGap?
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