Ten Years of Franz
meetfranz.com
meetfranz.com
Anyway; I gave this a try (on Mac) and was not impressed; coming in at 1.44GB, immediately very slow and my battery almost immediately flagging it as the app using the most energy, I went through the setup; after the setup was done I was left with a blue empty screen and nothing to click on. So I killed it and started again; that opened my workspace without any messengers added (I added 3 during setup). So I added whatsapp and that resulted in a half screen whatsapp on top of that darkblue again with no options other then to kill the app. After restart, whatsapp was there and working, albeit very slow (franz still consuming most energy); whatsapp is notably slower inside Franz than the separate one (they are both electron I think?).
Not Franz their fault, but I added Slack and literally spent 15 minutes solving Recaptcha's of buses over 50 of them, before it let me in... Wtf. I think Slack sucks at the best of times but this was very terrible.
Anyway; Not for me, but nice work sticking it out 10 years!
Btw actual solution for you might be plain old Pidgin
I have email locally dating to the dawn of the internet; it's one form of external mind-mapping for me. I'm completely baffled that a decent mail program can't handle the mail for a small town, rather than struggling with one person's life history. This is a question of algorithm choices; performance has to be the top priority. If search is instant, who needs "features"?
It's great to have a single app that shows notifications and tracks conversations.
Much better than having to try and remember if my conversation with "Tom" was via sms or signal or something else; he might have a messenger account but not use the app - doesn't matter - I just open beeper and find the last conversation and continue from there.
Ed: I don't use beeper or messaging on desktop - so Franz is DOA for me.
Which is a shame - it looks like a solid product.
Edit: I should say it's not Franz that has the crappier interface, it's the Slack webview, Franz's interface seems pretty nice. However, if something wants to be the biggest app binary on my Mac outside of Xcode and Logic Pro, it needs to offer a lot more than this.
I've been using the FOSS Ferdium (a fork of Ferdi, which was a fork of Franz) for many years, and generally find it to be a good experience. Anything annoying is surely inherent to electron and the services being connected to.
Beeper is completely free, but the downside is it was acquired by Automattic (the WordPress company with the CEO who crashed out over WP Engine)
Not necessarily true but buried in their FAQ section https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-much-does-beeper-cost-to-use
This is the cost of free.
Thanks ZIRP I guess.
Judging the product by its merits/substance and not by its storytelling/hype/hustle.
UX is important to me! That's why I do not use the inferior web client of telegram wrapped in electron but the real qt one.
Or, alternatively, I just pin the tab in my browser. The UX is so good there, you can even do some surfing beside the chatting.
Almost feels like the good old times of presto-based opera.
I don’t like the product either. But I can see why someone would buy it.
I've essentially created a whole niche of software from nothing. It is not an overstatement to say that the project has changed the world (to some degree, anyway).
Could've easily sold out with that but didn't. Make of that what you will.
But even if that all wasn't the case, none of my points would be invalid.
I am surprised that as an open source project maintainer that you would do that. Don’t you know first hand what it’s like to get lame comments about how your project is pointless? I’m surprised someone who maintains a notable project would be so willing to criticize others in this way.
“I don’t think a dick measuring contest is order here” is something that someone who lost the dick measuring contest would say. “I could have sold out.” I imagine Sequoia Capital was begging you to accept their term sheet for your third party robot vacuum firmware, but you were the better man and turned them down, gotta keep it real. Respect.
Unless..
What LLM is this? How did you get it to drop the guardrails?
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Okay, actually, looking at the comment history, this looks like a real person.
Oh man. Oh god.
Yeah uh.
Well. Have a nice evening I guess.
It’s common for commenters in online forums who have lost the argument to resort to ad hominem attacks — including references to their comment history and vague repulsion of the content of their character, despite they themselves possessing many of those same traits.
It’s not just that you — the person I am replying to — has no leg to stand on, it’s also a case of human stubbornness.
In the next phase after this reply, commenters in this situation will turn toward a melancholic assessment of their sadness and disappointment with the way the conversation went. They may bring up unrelated subjects — in this case, how corporate does not care about their opponent’s hustle culture mindset — further delivering an ad hominem attack disguised as charitable pity on their opponent’s constructed persona. The goal is not just to paint the opponent as wrong, it’s also to paint them as mentally unwell so that the content is further discredited despite its objective merit.
Typically, they will re-affirm the superior quality of their own character — this is a tactic used to maintain moral superiority and avoid discussing the issue at hand.
Their next move is simple — they will declare that they are done replying.
Critically, the commenter will never address the original criticism — in this case, never addressing their hypocrisy in willingness to deliver harsh and unwarranted criticism toward another commercially successful project — while refusing to accept similar criticism of their own project or admit that they would not enjoy the same surface-level aesthetic attacks against the merits of their own project.
But anyway.
Look, man, I don't think that this is contributing to this platform.
I.. uh.. hope, that this is just an internet persona for you, because if not, then I'm worried for your soul. (Basing this on the rest I've read).
Corporate doesn't care about you. Neither does hustle culture. That path clearly is not going to work out for you, so bad-faith attacking everything and anything that is against that is.. uh.. not really going to lead anywhere.
But you do you.
I for one am happy with my decisions and where I stand. I hope you can say the same about yourself.
I'm going to stop replying now.
If you write your own whatsapp/telegram/whatever client, be my guest. But just taking someone else's product and bare-minimum repackaging it is not the level of merit that would warrant 10 years of literally anything; let alone asking for payment for it.
Impostorware
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Also, just think about what a slap in the face this is for the people putting in the hard work of actually building the aforementioned web clients.
Some random other person comes along, takes their stuff and receives all the credit.
Which, yeah, okay, utilizing market inefficiencies. So that's clever. But it is also rather unethical. In my book, anyway.
Your ethics may vary.
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Having empathy is good and important and all, but you need to point it at the right people.
However, those rarely are the ones that are good at storytelling (in which Franz absolutely exceeds. Good job.)
Anyway. I repeat myself. My point is that I think you might've automatically deployed a defense script, which is good in itself, but bad when you're being effectively manipulated into deploying it against your own interests.
Which is.. well. ZIRP and its consequences
Some people paid for this