The author is exhibiting heavy denialism. The first indicator was gesturing towards IntelliJ IDEA as an example of a good desktop app. And whaddaya know, it turns out the author is affiliated. This isn't to say there's any intentional deception here—it's somewhere between self-deception and simply being unaware of one's own blindspots.
Without going through the effort of installing and running it, it's easy to see that IDEA looks just as good as it did 5 years ago—which is to say not great. And without any evidence saying otherwise, it's reasonable to assume that it hasn't gotten any more lightweight or nimble since then, either.
People writing JVM apps who tout their quality never seem to understand that their firsthand experience does not translate to other machine/system configurations that other people are running. It very well may be the case that those apps look and feel worse than an Electron app. (And one doesn't have to be a fan of Electron apps to admit this.)
It has actually. It starts a lot faster, and has a "lite" mode where it's more like a text editor.
As for how it looks, well, it's an IDE. It looks fine to me. There's a dark mode if you want it, the look is modern yet dense: sparsity being a common issue with web apps. Plenty of people use and like it.
The point about information density cannot be stressed enough for a "pro" tool.
Its keyboard friendliness is also highly underrated due to being a GUI -- I found it's rivaled only by emacs/vim in that I can go an entire work day without clicking around with a mouse.
It has nothing to do with dark mode. Dark mode screenshots are the first thing you'll see when you go looking for how IDEA looks today. It looks like a dark version of the UI from 5 years ago, unsurprisingly. Which means it still looks about as out of place as any Electron app. Although one would hope they've dealt with the bad antialiasing by now. Hard to say without downloading and running it, but the continued lack of polish and past propensity to pass the buck makes one question, "why bother?"
> As for how it looks, well, it's an IDE.
Not sure what this is supposed to mean. There are good looking IDEs. There's not something inherent to them that makes one look the way IDEA looks. It's the aforementioned blindspots and the "I don't see anything wrong with it" attitude that causes that.
My point is, I don't see the problems. Anti-aliasing works fine. The text looks good to me, always did. Looking out of place ... well, on macOS at least you can pick a mac-like theme. I don't because I prefer the IntelliJ theme but there's not much difference to it. All Mac apps are Windows 98 style battleship grey these days, the era when native toolkits had radically different looks to portable toolkits is over for a long time now.
Without going through the effort of installing and running it, it's easy to see that IDEA looks just as good as it did 5 years ago—which is to say not great. And without any evidence saying otherwise, it's reasonable to assume that it hasn't gotten any more lightweight or nimble since then, either.
People writing JVM apps who tout their quality never seem to understand that their firsthand experience does not translate to other machine/system configurations that other people are running. It very well may be the case that those apps look and feel worse than an Electron app. (And one doesn't have to be a fan of Electron apps to admit this.)