At ~175 MB with a blank drawing open, I've seen worse.
Some things I noticed about the menus (on Windows):
- The menus don't have hotkey support (Alt+…)
- The File menu is missing a Close option
- Submenus swich too soon on diagonal mouse movement
I'd suggest switching to native Windows menus. From other Electorn apps it seems this should be possible. I'm sure a way can be found to make the menu search feature work, too.
Another small note: on Windows, the close confirmation has the newer multi-option layout, the same you'd get when overwriting files in Explorer, but it only has an option to save changes. There is a cancel button, but that should really be an option.
I wish there was a desktop app that allowed me to draw diagrams in "vector" ascii art that I could then process with `dia` or another similar program to produce images.
Using ~110MB for me on Windows. Considering you can get 8GB of RAM for ~£54[0], running this application is costing me roughly 61p worth of RAM when open. Or, looking at it a different way, on a modest system I can run 720 versions of this program.
Honestly in an age where memory is so cheap I'd much rather have an Electron app for every conceivable thing (which take a fraction of the time to create) as opposed to fully fledged applications that only do a few things.
E: Having the tab open in Chrome appears to use more memory for me[0], perhaps because of the extensions I use?
Every time electron apps come up, I bring up slack. It's currently using 1.3GB on my machine. I've got Spotify open too, with another 800MB. Adding another 8GB is easy at the lower levels, but I've got 32GB of ram in this machine, and regularly have to kill slack and spotify when compiling to get back 2-3GB.
One thing about these is that Electron can be optimized. I believe that one of the Visual Studio tools uses it and has dramatically lower memory than slack. Slack just doesn't try to improve performance.
There is Brig (https://github.com/BrigJS/brig) but despite the fact that QML and JavaScript are already "married", and the immense popularity of both Qt and JS, it's far, far, away from Electron's maturity.
If you don't mind doing your UI in canvas (maybe with react-canvas) then these two look interesting, although Nidium doesn't seem to support desktop anymore.
https://www.nidium.com/http://impactjs.com/ejecta
On mobile, memory _may_ not be _that_ cheap if you look at what you pay for it in power requirements.
Exact data is hard to find, but, for example, http://www.buildcomputers.net/power-consumption-of-pc-compon... claims 2 to 3 watt per stick. That seems very little compared to CPU, video card or backlight, but your RAM more or less uses that _continuously_. Power usage doesn't go down if you don't use your laptop/tablet/phone, or don't use part of the memory (this may be an area where innovation is possible). So, power drain while your laptop/tablet/phone isn't is used may be dominated by RAM power requirements.
As I said: hard data is difficult to find, so I don't know how big this effect is. I think power usage is an important reason why Apple keeps the amount of RAM in their tablets and phones fairly low, though.
Price isn't the only issue; speed has to be considered as well. If you have a program, and it only uses a small amount of memory, it'll fit into the cache and run fast. If you have a program that uses many times more memory than the cache can hold, it'll run slow. No matter how cheap RAM is, the cache is still going to be fixed to a small size.
For what it's worth, I'm completely fine with this. 16GB of RAM is inexpensive now and given the number of apps I have running at a time 0.25GB or so doesn't make any difference.
> it was electron or nothing for us
People forget this when demanding native versions. Creating multiple native apps is not free.
Does anyone have reasons why I might choose Draw.io over Gliffy? One major reason I use Gliffy is for Confluence integration at work, but I'm not opposed to using another tool and uploading the images if it is better.
The key driver for the way we approach draw.io is the trust issue that all SaaS apps suffer from. Not only do they have your data, they have the app as well.
We always followed the approach of never store user data. On the app side of things, open sourcing the codebase went part of the way, but you'd still have to be technical enough to serve the app.
The Desktop versions are critical in that regard, you know you've got a tool that can't be taken away that will always open your diagrams (which you control the storage of).
You don't hear SaaS providers talking about this, because giving up control means lower profits, less chance of an IPO.
For those worried about the electron memory usage, I'd recommend yEd from yworks.com. I've used it as a portable app at home and work and it's full featured and small.
Draw.io is definitely in the top 10 of the most useful apps I've ever encountered. I'm constantly using it to illustrate my blog posts and videos, for mindmapping, for drawing diagrams that help me to understand some new idea I'm learning about(like React/Redux or Docker). And for website mockups of course.
If you haven't used it yet - I highly recommend it!
48 comments
[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadSome things I noticed about the menus (on Windows):
- The menus don't have hotkey support (Alt+…)
- The File menu is missing a Close option
- Submenus swich too soon on diagonal mouse movement
I'd suggest switching to native Windows menus. From other Electorn apps it seems this should be possible. I'm sure a way can be found to make the menu search feature work, too.
Another small note: on Windows, the close confirmation has the newer multi-option layout, the same you'd get when overwriting files in Explorer, but it only has an option to save changes. There is a cancel button, but that should really be an option.
Edit: memory measured with:
I don't know if that's the right way to go about it.https://monodraw.helftone.com
https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Asciio
As it's not completely obvious, Asciio will save to plain text if you simply use the .txt extension, and else its own binary editable format.
Asciio is present in Debian/Ubuntu repositories.
Edit: nevermind, misunderstood; this isn't what you're looking for.
Here's a demo: http://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/
Since it's an electron app, I suspect there's going to be the flak about the memory usage.
But at the end of the day, these electron apps are fulfilling the need of users who enjoy desktop experiences of their essential web apps
But as you say, it was electron or nothing for us, no way we can justify native apps.
Honestly in an age where memory is so cheap I'd much rather have an Electron app for every conceivable thing (which take a fraction of the time to create) as opposed to fully fledged applications that only do a few things.
E: Having the tab open in Chrome appears to use more memory for me[0], perhaps because of the extensions I use?
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/HyperX-FURY-DDR3-Memory-Module/dp/B...
[1] https://puu.sh/xbNzL/503e54735e.png
http://alternativeto.net/software/electron/
One thing about these is that Electron can be optimized. I believe that one of the Visual Studio tools uses it and has dramatically lower memory than slack. Slack just doesn't try to improve performance.
This isn't Electron's fault. I have plenty Java apps just as guilty.
I do wish Slack was a better case for Electron. JavaScript isn't immune from leaky bad patterns, just the same as other langs/environments.
Exact data is hard to find, but, for example, http://www.buildcomputers.net/power-consumption-of-pc-compon... claims 2 to 3 watt per stick. That seems very little compared to CPU, video card or backlight, but your RAM more or less uses that _continuously_. Power usage doesn't go down if you don't use your laptop/tablet/phone, or don't use part of the memory (this may be an area where innovation is possible). So, power drain while your laptop/tablet/phone isn't is used may be dominated by RAM power requirements.
As I said: hard data is difficult to find, so I don't know how big this effect is. I think power usage is an important reason why Apple keeps the amount of RAM in their tablets and phones fairly low, though.
> it was electron or nothing for us
People forget this when demanding native versions. Creating multiple native apps is not free.
is there a native cocoa app that does latex diagrams
The key driver for the way we approach draw.io is the trust issue that all SaaS apps suffer from. Not only do they have your data, they have the app as well.
We always followed the approach of never store user data. On the app side of things, open sourcing the codebase went part of the way, but you'd still have to be technical enough to serve the app.
The Desktop versions are critical in that regard, you know you've got a tool that can't be taken away that will always open your diagrams (which you control the storage of).
You don't hear SaaS providers talking about this, because giving up control means lower profits, less chance of an IPO.
Draw.io is definitely in the top 10 of the most useful apps I've ever encountered. I'm constantly using it to illustrate my blog posts and videos, for mindmapping, for drawing diagrams that help me to understand some new idea I'm learning about(like React/Redux or Docker). And for website mockups of course.
If you haven't used it yet - I highly recommend it!