Another 205MB Electron App to the collection, at least it's 50MB smaller than Wire.
[1] https://githubengineering.com/how-four-native-developers-wro...
[2] https://slack.engineering/growing-pains-migrating-slacks-des...
Good enough for me personally.
Signal support is coming later this year. Right now it supports Slack, Skype, Facebook, and Gmail.
Franz https://github.com/meetfranz/franz
These are similar apps. Though they do use Electron, they let you share one Electron instance for all your chat services.
My main problem with Rambox when I first tried it was that it couldn't remember my sessions across restarts for some reason. A quick test shows that Franz doesn't have this problem.
Also, the API for adding new integrations looks delightfully simple [1]! I'll probably take some time over the weekend to try to port over some of the things I use frequently that aren't yet available. Though it'd be even better if it offered a first-class escape hatch to add simple integrations through the app itself like Rambox does.
[1] https://github.com/meetfranz/plugins/blob/master/docs/integr...
window can't be resized, standard menus are missing, standard keyboard shortcuts for text fields don't work, conversion text can't be selected, no way to cut or copy text (tho paste does seem to work).
is it implementing its own ui toolkit? qt maybe?
Right now the focus is on features and performance, but the app is going to be polished before the 1.0 release to have a more native feel: native notifications, shortcuts, textfields, etc.
(actually, i'm not sure if it's possible to make your app friendly to screen readers w/o using native widgets. maybe?)
if you do pull it off, you'll end up with a great ui toolkit for go. that would be a very interesting thing!
"Oh no I can't use that business chat tool, it doesn't support smiley faces and cat reaction gifs".
The key thing Slack offers most 'customers' (even those who don't pay) compared to something like IRC is the simple setup/use.
I say this as someone who hates Slack, but has had to endure it on a number of client projects.
3 of those 4 things I would class as "simple setup/use".
I can imagine someone saying "we switched to/chose Slack/HipChat/etc over IRC because it's much simpler to administer and a lot more user-friendly for people to communicate with the team".
I cannot imagine someone saying "we switched to/chose Slack/HipChat/etc over IRC because I need my daily dose of cat reaction gifs"
Also, if you're relying on a stupid cat gif to judge your colleagues mental well-being (and you are concerned about their mental well-being), perhaps you need to spend more time talking to them and less time searching for dank memes.
So this isn't light or native. It uses the same Chromium codebase, but atleast twice the size of Electron apps.
https://hardbin.com/ipfs/QmNttGPf65DZ3eeuNCCWemrxyNzaHxLhpAZ...
If the rest of you are wondering where the bulk of it came from, check libcef.so (466 MB)- which is Chromium Embedded Framework.
That said, I could not get the app to work with Google Hangouts or Facebook Messenger after 5 minutes of fiddling, so I gave up.
I'll switch to Servo in the future, it's only ~20MB.
I could understand if it was a GB or so, but in this day and age it's USD 9c or less worth of disk space (assuming you use high end SSDs, if it's a HDD then it's under 1c).