{"id":24252,"date":"2021-08-20T15:28:43","date_gmt":"2021-08-20T22:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=24252"},"modified":"2021-08-22T07:13:10","modified_gmt":"2021-08-22T14:13:10","slug":"1password-electron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/1password-electron\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day the Internet Lost Its Mind about 1Password Becoming an Electron App"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week every single Apple-centric podcast was busy with hand wringing about Apple\u2019s new child protection efforts. This week they have a new target for their hand wringing, and it\u2019s the changes that the folks at AgileBits announced about 1Password.<\/p>\n

What Happened Was\u2026<\/h2>\n

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Michael Fey wrote a blog post at 1password.com<\/a> explaining how 1Password has evolved over time as they went from a Mac app alone to adding iOS, Android, Windows and Linux applications. He describes the challenges of keeping multiple teams developing independently and yet in parallel along with a server-side team and how this approach slowed them down from doing the enhancements they wanted to do. I won\u2019t try to replicate what he explains, but the bottom line is that their new approach has gotten the Internet\u2019s collective panties in a bunch.<\/p>\n

The panties in a bunch part is that starting with 1Password 8, which is now out in public beta, 1Password is no longer a native Mac app, it\u2019s an Electron app.<\/p>\n

Electron apps are kind of like web apps, in that they\u2019re written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The advantage from a developer’s point of view is that they can write one set of code for macOS, Windows, and Linux to perform the necessary functions of an app. Then the developer can use the HTML and CSS to make it look appropriate for the operating system you\u2019re on. For example, on macOS, you would expect the stoplight red\/yellow\/green buttons in the upper left, but on Windows, you\u2019d expect the red box with a white X in the upper right.<\/p>\n

Electron apps have a bad reputation, and I\u2019ve been trying to figure out why. The two biggest reasons I\u2019ve heard are that Electron apps can be bloated (using up tons of RAM) and that they don\u2019t look or act like native apps.<\/p>\n

Abandonment Issues<\/h2>\n

\"ChildBut the loud Mac people on the Internet seem to have come up with a third reason. They feel betrayed and abandoned. I find this reaction fascinating. They\u2019re assuming that the new app will be terrible, won\u2019t feel like a Mac app at all, and this is just the beginning of the end for 1Password and it will no longer be the darling of our community.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to try to draw an analogy and I\u2019m not sure it works but here goes. It\u2019s like if your parents sold the home you grew up in and bought a condo in a nicer climate. You feel betrayed because it was your home<\/em>. You\u2019re not even going to look at the new condo to find out that it\u2019s got an awesome pool, and they made sure there was a guest room so you can stay over any time you like. Because you feel betrayed and abandoned, you won\u2019t give it a chance.<\/p>\n

The funny thing is that many of these loud people haven\u2019t even tried the beta for 1Password 8. Some are hollering on Twitter and in their podcasts after having tested the very first beta out of the gate for only an hour. They haven\u2019t mentioned filing bug or feature requests to the 1Password team, they\u2019re just sad and angry and they\u2019re very loud about it. I heard one very loud podcaster complaining that when he mistyped his password, the field didn’t jiggle. Seriously, this was the first complaint he made about the new beta.<\/p>\n

You Are Probably Already Running Electron Apps<\/h2>\n

I\u2019d heard about Electron apps starting maybe a year ago, and I was pretty sure a few of my apps were already Electron. I was curious whether some of the apps I enjoy were Electron and I didn\u2019t even realize it.<\/p>\n

Cameron Nokes wrote a blog post on how to know if a desktop app uses Electron<\/a> and in the post he gives us a nifty little bash<\/code> script to run in the Terminal to find out how many we have and which ones they are.<\/p>\n

I took a look at the script and with my limited knowledge of bash scripting, I was able to determine that it appeared to do what Cameron said it did, so I copied it into a text file, made it executable and ran it from the command line in the Terminal.<\/p>\n

While I thought I had maybe 4 or 5 Electron apps, Cameron’s script revealed that I have 15 apps that are Electron-based, and I use at least 10 of them regularly:<\/p>\n