Anthropic’s Claude AI Chatbot Now Has a Mac App, But It’s an Electron Turd

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Claude, the AI chatbot made by Anthropic, now has a desktop app. You can download the Mac and Windows versions of the app from Anthropic’s website for free.

Sebastiaan de With, on X:

Big miss from Anthropic releasing a super clunky macOS electron app that feels like a bad wrapper of their website. Very weird non-standard UI all over, choppy and sloppy animations.

OpenAI is really leagues ahead in making good apps (+ has ChatGPT Search rolling out today).

There’s much talk that Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 has pulled ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o in terms of chatbot “intelligence”, but as an overall experience ChatGPT wins hands-down. For one thing ChatGPT has been able to search the web for answers for a while now, and it works great. For another, just today OpenAI launched ChatGPT’s dedicated “search” mode. Claude has nothing like it.

But even their respective Mac apps are a stark contrast. The Claude app is a lazy Electron port. Right off the bat, the email field on the login screen doesn’t support autofill. Once you’re logged in, you don’t get any standard MacOS features. And of course because it’s Electron it’s bloated architecturally and uses a lot of memory. If you really want to use Claude as an “app” on your Mac you’d be better off saving a web app with Safari (File → Add to Dock…) than using this.

ChatGPT’s native Mac app, on the other hand, is a truly native Mac app. It looks like a Mac app and feels like a Mac app because it really is a Mac app. I’ve liked it ever since it launched back in May, and it keeps getting better. And I keep using it more and more as my go-to resource for answering questions.

I asked Claude, “What is the best way to engineer a native Mac app? What frameworks and developer tools should one use if the goal is a great Mac experience?” Claude’s answer started by positing it as a decision between SwiftUI and AppKit. Perhaps Anthropic’s Mac engineers should have asked Claude this same question before they built this turd of an Electron app.

★ Thursday, 31 October 2024