I appreciate the versatility of electron and it giving us beautiful and usable apps but I have 16 GB of ram, I can't upgrade it and I genuinely have multi second hangs after I have 3 instances of VSCode, Firefox and Chrome open along with Bruno.
How much would you be willing to pay for such a client?
I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know, because as an independent developer, every single time I suggest a native application using native widgets to a client, they choose the HTML interface rather than a Qt or similar based interface.
The easily doable pretty animations in CSS in a 800MB-in-RAM-while-running application is, to paying clients, preferable than a 50MB-in-RAM-while-running that doesn't have the fancy spinning, tilting, animated wizz-bangs.
I have been writing software professionally since the mid-90s; I can do you a quick GUI-based cross-platform HTTP send+receive application based on libcurl in about 2 weeks. Looking at the minimum I need to make to pay my bills, I need purchasers paying a cumulative 1000USD for this effort, so 10x buyers @ $100, or 100 buyers @ $10, and so forth.
And, of course, I'd expect to only be able to sell it for a short while, if it is popular, until a clone starts up with $40k worth of SEO and advertising money.
The software you want can be had, and the skill to make it exists, in a timeframe that is feasible, but the economics are just not there.
Me too. But the problem with "the economics just aren't there" means that if I cannot get, just from word-of-mouth (say, a Show HN post) 100 users @ $10 once-off lifetime purchase, then this is not a product that is in demand anyway. An open-source/free product that is exactly the same would similarly receive no love from users.
IOW, if not enough users exist for this product at $10, not enough users exist for this product at $0. Your passion product will still result in the dev burning out on the fact that no one wants their passion enough.
I think you can argue that, if you have enough demand at $10, that you’ll have enough at $0, but I don’t see how not having demand at $10 implies that you won’t have demand at $0, since usually making something cheaper can change buyer’s minds.
My point is not that the user would go without. My point is that if your product is not desirable or differentiated enough that enough people would pay $10 for it, then making it free won't help because it will be lost in a sea of clones that already existed before you even started working on your product.
After all, look at your list - todo list apps, time tracker apps and budgeting apps; you cannot, in the sea of free competition right now, deliver a desirable enough app in any of those classes, unless it provides so much value over and above the others that many people are willing to shell out $10 for it.
IOW, if the product does not provide enough value for some people to pay $10 for it, making it $0 won't make a difference because it doesn't provide anything over and above the entrenched free offerings.
why this couldn’t be SOMEONE’S ELSE passion project
- For Rust apps: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri
- For Go apps: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails
[1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/blog/orchids.mp4
Only thing I don't like about Bruno is that you cannot generate a documentation from your api call tests.
But apart from that Bruno is open source (MIT), you can fork it and have it anyway you want…
The paid option seems just like the traditional open source model of make software free but offer enterprise support. And given that CTOs tent to want to pay for stuff (postman is terrible nowadays but is still picked and paid for) why would Bruno straight up say no to money?
What I do resent is the fact that Bruno was a reaction to shitty restrictions from another application, and they did the same thing a few months/years later.
Bruno seems to charge somewhere between 70-130 dollars user/year for unlocking GUI features. The same features are all accessible via the terminal or IDE.
Then second aspect is the "well-hidden" JS runtime or the general dislike of Javascript, but this point has been explained by other commenters well enough.
That’s not needed. Generally there’s a webview available on the system of choice. All major platforms have it, including mobile and many Linux distros.
> vulnerabilities
Such as? I mean yes if you load remote content with local access to FS etc (although that’s not within the webview). But you don’t need to (nor should you).
EDIT: There's one called Posting which seems to be the most popular: https://github.com/darrenburns/posting
I think Electron gets a bad rep mostly because big companies use it to build low quality apps.
Electron is hated for very good reasons. Postman in particular is just so insanely bloated and sluggish, it's painful to use on anything that doesn't have a higher end CPU.