Comment by comex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by comex | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> 4. A few good, Open Source native ports already exist, and people are just unaware of them.

Native GUI clients:

- Ripcord: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

- Wey: https://github.com/yue/wey ("written in Node.js with native UI powered by the Yue library")

- Volt: https://volt-app.com

IRC bridges (allow using Slack from native IRC clients):

- wee-slack: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

- irc-slack: https://github.com/insomniacslk/irc-slack

- bitlbee: http://bitlbee.org (using libpurple)

libpurple plugin (allows using Slack from Pidgin, Adium, bitlbee):

- https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple

- Adium (native macOS app) plugin based on it: https://github.com/victori/slack4adium

CLI clients:

- https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-term

- https://github.com/haskellcamargo/sclack

- the emacs one you mentioned

Most of these clients don't support 100% of Slack's features, aren't as pretty, and are generally not as 'polished' as the official client. But they're also mostly written by individuals in their spare time, as opposed to a team of full-time employees. So no, I don't think that native clients are 'actually a lot harder to build and maintain'.

To be fair, if you want it to be that pretty you will have to either reinvent two-thirds of a browser or half a game engine. There's a reason "rich UI"s are a pain to build compared to native GUIs (MSFT Xaml is more similar to a web browser than traditional winforms-style UI).

The best compromise right now is to aggressively build pretty, heavily themed prebaked designs. Think Material Design, Cupertino etc. so native UI is somewhat good looking too even though it may not be as "rich" as a React one with all the drag and drop animation and flashy trinkets. Feature wise of course there's only marginal improvement to old school Java Swing, but it's certainly easier on the eyes.

Maybe on some platforms. I'm a Mac user, so speaking for that platform, AppKit has had built-in animation support for over a decade (and now with Catalyst you can also use UIKit if you want). Drag-and-drop in particular has animations out of the box when using certain built-in widgets – e.g. when you're dragging an item into an NSOutlineView, the existing item at the cursor will slide down to make room for it. (But what in Slack is even draggable? I can't seem to drag to rearrange channels, for instance.)

Exactly my point, OS X has tons of prebuilt designs with knobs for customization. But at the end of the day they can still be built rather quickly. Drag and drop the components in Xcode, tweak a few variables and animations here and there and you have a perfect looking app that is coherent and consistent with the rest of the system. On the other hand, a modern successful SaaS requires hundreds of man hours of work just on design and UI alone. For web, nobody wants consistency. People gets upset if every site looks exactly like bootstrap. Sites have to be styled, branded, made unique. Yet for traditional desktop i.e. not electron, the moment a cross platform native UI library look vaguely off, devs throw a fit. Think Gtk, Qt, Swing etc.

Nice -- I assumed there were at least one or two, didn't know there were so many!

Once Riot and Matrix pick up steam, I suspect the Electron debate will be even less of a real issue, since you can pretty safely build a native client for Matrix and know for sure that nobody on the corporate side is going to get annoyed and tell you stop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com