Tell me what it is, show me what it looks like, provide a "Hello, World!" API example for opening a window on the front page. Stop contributing to landing pages that jerk the consumer around.
I want people to be direct about how my projects need to improve, because I know how it doesn't meet my standards, but I don't know how it fails to meet other people's standards, which is more important if you're concerned with adoption.
See my other post in this thread for an example.
They've got a point. Time to cut through the hype, get straight to the point and show some screenshots to catch their eyes.
If you can't manage that, the tab gets closed with in 5 seconds. Even if it has the Rust buzzword. (Because that trick always works on HN)
But of course, there is not much to see, it's just a window with a web view inside of it.
https://guijs.dev/ https://github.com/samirdjelal/bidirectional/ https://github.com/mmpneo/simple-obs-stt
> ...the Tauri-team incubated and maintained WRY, which creates a unified interface to the system webview (and other goodies like Menu and Taskbar), leveraging WebKit on macOS, WebView2 on Windows and WebKitGTK on Linux.
Besides, all of the relevant engines are WebKit variants, so you're not targeting Trident or Gecko or anything.
Bear in mind that a lot of popular "apps", like Slack, Discord, etc., are web apps anyway, so there's a decent chance that the "support more than one of them" problem is already solved anyway, meaning you don't have to spend any more development time but you get huge increases in performance and responsiveness.
Answering my own question, https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry , so looks like it loses one of the advantages of Electron in that you control the exact browser in use. Maybe that's incorrect. Who knows? Web site appears to not exist to provide such important details.
https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/blob/dev/ARCHITECTURE.md could lose a few thousand words, but this seems to be the real starting off point
It's not for "people like me," it's for everyone. In terms of volume of traffic you're going to get, no one else cares about this stuff.
Here's an example of one of my projects where I do just that: https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/ Literally! I tell people what my team has built. I show them a screenshot. I then provide API examples. Mine could be better if I provided screenshots per API example, too. Everyone can improve.
Your audience is technical, they don't want a non-technical pitch. Tell me it's faster than Electron, show me RAM usage comparisons, etc.
Avoid putting things in people's face before they've gotten to know you. You're not trying to be a food blog throwing pop-ups in people's faces about how they need to subscribe to your newsletter. You're trying to be a competitor to Electron.
Here's what their website tells me what they do:
> Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
Ah! OK. I'm interested. And see how specific they are? Don't be vague. Don't say "web front-end," what do you mean? React? They then show me screenshots! Of what big companies built!
Then. They provide a Getting Started section. Not great, could be better. I want to see how it's used. But this is the bar. Be better than that bar.
Edit: Even Electron's site provides Getting Started at the end.
We say "web frontend" because that's as descriptive as we can be really. We support any web framework that runs in a browser. As for screenshots of big companies' apps, we don't have any major companies that have adopted Tauri yet, as we just came out of alpha, but we will add a section like that as soon as we can.
It's difficult for us to demonstrate how Tauri is used in short snippets that could fit at the beginning of the Getting Started section. Electron's site doesn't have any code snippets either, just snippets for installing via npm and some example apps.
It also doesn't help that we chose a language that isn't popular. But you all need to think about how decision making like that massively effects adoption.
You won't learn these lessons quickly, they take years, so ignore people who say you need to experiment and research what works. The biggest issues you'll face is that no one will tell you what's wrong unless you're faced with it in threads like this on HN or other places where you'll meet consumers.
The worst part of it is, these are the obnoxious glaring details. There might be massive decisions you make that consumers can't pinpoint for you. Thought-leaders don't often describe those details because of survivorship bias.
What I can see this team failing at, too, is that you need an anchor client. You're spending all this time on BS that doesn't mean anything at all.
Specifically, at GitHub, they already had users using Atom, which made for a great way to advertise Electron. It was Atom!
You need to essentially find whales (Read: engineering leaders at businesses) and make the product good enough for one of them to say, yeah I'll use this over Electron, and if they're an attractive user, pump them on your front page. Find a way to make a deal with them so that you can funnel developers to their hiring channels.
When you create entities in the engine, all you have to do is specify what fields you want networked, and the game engine automatically serializes deltas for you on that field as they change.
It takes care of more advanced field networking like prediction as well.
You focus on making things, not making them networkable. If you want that, you just say it's networked. That's it.
Similar idea with news. The objectives of profit and conveying meaningful information aren't necessarily aligned.
Disregarding the subjectivity of 'meaningful,' the advice 'know your target audience' is good from both a product design and marketing presentation stand point.
Maybe it is possible to have a landing page that people leave much more quickly but that is more successful. Maybe it is possible to keep your audience informed without them watching for very long.
It's not that the site is 'marketing speak', it's just that it's a 3/10 on communications.
Even two sentences at the top would help.
I've spent a minute on it and I'm not sure what it is.
It's a way to make apps, but it doesn't have a front end? I don't even know what that means.
Even though the project itself sounds very promising, because "Rust" and "Electron alternative".
But how can I know if it really is an Electron replacement if I'm not even sure if I can create native context menus or integrate it into the SysTray?
Then provide screenshots/code samples for each item in the feature list.
That sounds like a solution. Or just add some screenshots/code samples to what is already implemented in the roadmap.
Also, I liked the way they presented their roadmap.
That's the first paragraph on the About page. Landing pages have multiple purposes and need to address different types of viewers, not just the neckbeards. The marketing speak is likely more for convincing IT manages this is a legit project and does not have common "deal breakers".
If this is the case, it's an excellent reason to not use Tauri. Making their decisions based on what IT managers want to read rather than what developers need to do their job? Good luck with that, might work in some bubbles but the rest of the world is trying to be productive.
yarn add @tauri-apps/cli
yarn tauri init
yarn tauri build