12 ms·

Mac Open Web

186 points by mrzool 7y ago

seltzered_ 7y ago
Why did the author of the list focus around the Apple ecosystem? How exactly do design tools like acorn/pixelmator promote the open web?
- rlt 7y ago
  Yeah, this is just a list of favorite apps among the indie Apple developer crowd. I'm surprised Daring Fireball didn't end up on there somehow :)
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    Is DF still relevant? I feel he's lost his independence from AAPL since they started taking him seriously.
    - steve_adams_86 7y ago
      He routinely critiques them and their executives. He seems very independent to me.
- pcr910303 7y ago
  > Why did the author of the list focus around the Apple ecosystem? I believe it's more strange to not believe it shouldn't be focused on Apple, considering the link title includes 'Mac'? > How exactly do design tools like acorn/pixelmator promote the open web? Looks like the author believes that the tools make photo-editing much more beginner-friendly (and that is true), lowering the barrier and allowing more people to participate to the web (hence the open web).
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    > I believe it's more strange to not believe it shouldn't be focused on Apple, considering the link title includes 'Mac'? Maybe the name shouldn't include that, then? > Looks like the author believes that the tools make photo-editing much more beginner-friendly (and that is true), lowering the barrier and allowing more people to participate to the web (hence the open web). A $40 application running on a platform that thinks $1100 is appropriate entry-level pricing isn't lowering anyone's barriers to anything.
    - seltzered_ 7y ago
      Yes, you're expressing a rawer form of my comments intent. The point was to provoke thinking about other ecosystems, and possibly have a site that may shows gaps that may need to be filled, or areas where just a bit of polish could be done. Digressing, some of the gaps may be outside of apps/open web and more to do with infrastructure/pricing (see: https://catonmat.net/incredible-events-at-browserling https://catonmat.net/incredible-events-at-browserling (india and whatsapp), and as a slight contrast whatsapp-centrism in brazil: https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1340 https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1340 ). Some areas of the world, pragmatically at this point in time, may not be served better through mere 'open web' evangelism. In fairness, I make the same mistakes as the original author as someone who has works within an Apple-centric ecosystem and is in similar first-world social circles.
    - yoz-y 7y ago
      > Maybe the name shouldn't include that, then? Why not? There are already a lot of resources for various other ecosystems. Should all PlayStation focused publications also include games for all platforms? Should Android Police talk about Symbian?
hilyen 7y ago
I feel like Visual Studio Code deserves a spot. Its open source, and free. Unlike a lot of the listed editors.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Agreed... I use it pretty much everywhere at this point. Others may load slightly faster, or perform slightly better.. but it's consistent with the best plugin ecosystem of any editor I've used and performs way better than any full on IDE by comparison with a fair share of the features.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Indeed, most people seem to forget the dark ages before VS Code. When you were forced to choose between either slow heavy weights like Visual Studio/Intellij (and its relatives PyCharm et alia)/Eclipse that took forever to start up without a SSD drive or fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc. The latter requires tons of plugins and config to get anywhere near the featureset of the former while the former often seem to have way too many knobs hidden behind collapsible panels on the side. Sure, greybeards may dismiss this as "entitled thinking" when in the Good Ol' Days when people only needed ACME with no syntax highlighting or simply Ed. Sure, but you cannot deny the productivity boost of zero-config Intellisense autocompletion that works out of the box. Language Servers that get installed automatically with all it's dependencies etc. when the parent editor plugin is installed. Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell that required fiddling with PATH variables, jumping between FSF's poorly formatted documentation and the target language tooling. Do not mention its interaction with Python Virtualenvs; it still gives me nightmares. Getting Sublime Text working with stuff like Clojure etc. required tons of fiddling and watching YouTube videos that all differs slightly in methods. Many days were wasted editing Sublime Plugin configs and JSON files. VS Code forced editors like Atom etc. to up their game in performance, features, speed etc. Zero-config language setup and automatic prompting for installing plugins are now the norm thanks to the efforts of the wonderful VS Code team. The Vim plugin in VS Code is also second to none. Also, a shout-out to Sublime Text for kick-starting the lightweight editor revolution in the first place, with it's cross-platform TextMate style interface and its beautiful Monokai UI color scheme. Kudos! And for Lisp users, Light Table and Nightcode deserves praise for helping to modernize Lisp and demolishing Emacs' forced monopoly that turned off so many interested beginners. Well done Chris (and team) and Zach, thank you for bringing fresh blood and perspectives!
justinsaccount 7y ago
yes, help promote the open web by using proprietary tools on a proprietary platform
- filoleg 7y ago
  > proprietary tools What do you mean? The tools listed in OP are all open-source, which is the opposite of proprietary. I googled for the definition of "proprietary" prior to replying, because I thought I might have had it wrong, but wikipedia defines it as "closed-source software".[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software EDIT: I apologize, I was wrong, and a lot of the tools on the page are not open-source. I read the name of the website, clicked on a couple of projects, and they were open-source. So I assumed the rest was as well, given that + the name of the website.
  - etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
    Except many of the tools listed are definitely not open source...
  - rlt 7y ago
    Most of the tools referenced on https://macopenweb.com/ https://macopenweb.com/ are not open source.
  - knd775 7y ago
    The majority of the tools on this web page are closed source.
ryanseys 7y ago
Maybe these open web apps should be built on the... open web?
mahesh_rm 7y ago
Plug: does anybody have anything good to recommend as a free/open source alternative to the featured: https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/ and https://www.svgator.com/ https://www.svgator.com/ for producing animated svg/canvas like these: https://tumult.com/hype/gallery/HerokuPlatformScale/HerokuPlatformScale.html https://tumult.com/hype/gallery/HerokuPlatformScale/HerokuPl...?
- mdaniel 7y ago
  Are you aware of AlternativeTo.net? https://alternativeto.net/software/svgator/?license=opensource https://alternativeto.net/software/svgator/?license=opensour...
st3fan 7y ago
Firefox is missing.
duxup 7y ago
What qualifies as "promote the open web"?
eugeniub 7y ago
Nothing quiet says "open web" like closed-source, proprietary, expensive applications like Pixelmator and Sublime Text.
- jhawk28 7y ago
  fits under the indie Mac application classification
- jolmg 7y ago
  s/quiet/quite/
- phaer 7y ago
  ...running on a closed-source, proprietary and expensive platform
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  Pixelmator is 40 bucks, in what universe where someone who has the money to buy a Mac considers $40 for a professional application expensive?
  - machinecoffee 7y ago
    And worth every penny IMHO. For me it hits the sweet spot between a massive feature filled Adobe product and struggling with e.g. Gimp for simple creation of icons.
  - h1d 7y ago
    I thought Pixelmator's audience was general public and I think it does an excellent job at it. Perhaps Affinity series are targeted for professional and they're also one time purchase of something like $50. Great value.
- SebastianKra 7y ago
  Yes, the real open web is a magical place of rainbows, unicorns, and developers surviving on the power of friendship.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
knd775 7y ago
This list is honestly kind of embarrassing. Both the inclusions and glaring exclusions are just odd. How can most of these be considered to be "promot[ing] the open web"..?
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Both the inclusions and glaring exclusions are just odd. He included Panic's Coda, but not Transmit, or Prompt. I'd be hosed without that trio. If Panic made a database client, I'd drive to Portland and hand them a fist full of cash. That bunch of weirdos knows what its doing.
  - Cenk 7y ago
    I have been very happy with Sequel Pro (https://www.sequelpro.com https://www.sequelpro.com), and not just because of the fantastic icon
    - h1d 7y ago
      Might want to consider using TablePlus instead as SequelPro has pretty much stalled development and MySQL 8 support hasn't been out for quite a while and their nightlies that supports it are too buggy to use. Also TablePlus supports quite a few number of databases.
      - Cenk 7y ago
        I’ve actually been using TablePlus as well, mainly for accessing a MSSQL database. I find it a bit awkward to use and not as fast as Sequel Pro, but nonetheless a useful and a good recommendation.
    - rimliu 7y ago
      There is also Querios https://www.araelium.com/querious https://www.araelium.com/querious.
    - Angostura 7y ago
      I ws always a fan of https://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/ https://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/
pcr910303 7y ago
Open Web != Free software. I like & try to support Free software (I'm writing this in a Linux laptop with Firefox & I try to donate to the GNU regularly), but the fact that some apps are the so-called 'closed-source, proprietary' apps doesn't disqualify them to contribute to the Open Web. Open Web (if I understood correctly) is more about lowering the barrier (skills & time) to participate to the web. Most of the apps qualify IMO. Things like Postgres.app or Pixelmator are the apps that directly match the category. I just don't understand why some 'Free software proponents' see proprietary apps as 'evil'. :-( Do all indie-programmers have to select between starving to death or working in a company that one can't enjoy? Can't s?he monetize the app/service s?he made?
- zaksoup 7y ago
  This is a great point and one of my biggest complaints with the hard-core FOSS/Copy-left software movement. More indie developers is a good thing, even if everything they make isn't necessarily all open source/free. As an aside, did you know that They/Them has been in use for centuries as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and often makes your text clearer and more readable when referring to a single person of unknown or unspecified gender?
  - pcr910303 7y ago
    > As an aside, did you know that They/Them has been in use for centuries as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and often makes your text clearer and more readable when referring to a single person of unknown or unspecified gender? Oh, I couldn’t remind of they/them as I am not a native speaker of English. Thanks for pointing that out!
ernsheong 7y ago
As people are saying here, what is "promoting the open web"? Also, web apps basically dilute the list, maybe you should focus on native macOS/iOS apps to stay niche.
arvinsim 7y ago
Anyone here use RSS? Just curious on your setup since I find that using bookmarks is enough for me.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  I have very few sites that I check regularly in my rss reader (I use Feedly as aggregator and Reeder app for reading). A few blogs (Daring Fireball, CGP Grey's Blog, Stratechery, MacRumors) a few webcomic and so on. Some of them I just skim for headlines, and I put longer articles into Instapaper.
- donatj 7y ago
  As I started to use Facebook less and less I wanted a replacement for getting a nice curated mix of posts. I have happily started using RSS again after a long hiatus. Also there’s no internet in our bathroom at work so it’s been great to solve that.
donatj 7y ago
It’s borderline creepy how often I find a link and 24 hours later it shows up on Hacker News. Yesterday I was organizing some documents in Dropbox, found my ancient license for NetNewsWire. I wondered if they were still around, and did some Googling. Their GitHub has a link to macopenweb.com
naaaaak 7y ago
This list bills itself as "apps that help promote the open web", then lists apps that have relished in removing freedom of speech. For example, Overcast participated in the de-personing witchhunt of Alex Jones / Infowars by removing it from their directory, then celebrated on Twitter as if he was stamping out "hate speech". How is blatant political censorship worthy of "the open web"?

186 points by mrzool 7y ago

Why did the author of the list focus around the Apple ecosystem? How exactly do design tools like acorn/pixelmator promote the open web?

rlt 7y ago
Yeah, this is just a list of favorite apps among the indie Apple developer crowd. I'm surprised Daring Fireball didn't end up on there somehow :)
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Is DF still relevant? I feel he's lost his independence from AAPL since they started taking him seriously.
  - steve_adams_86 7y ago
    He routinely critiques them and their executives. He seems very independent to me.
pcr910303 7y ago
> Why did the author of the list focus around the Apple ecosystem? I believe it's more strange to not believe it shouldn't be focused on Apple, considering the link title includes 'Mac'? > How exactly do design tools like acorn/pixelmator promote the open web? Looks like the author believes that the tools make photo-editing much more beginner-friendly (and that is true), lowering the barrier and allowing more people to participate to the web (hence the open web).
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  > I believe it's more strange to not believe it shouldn't be focused on Apple, considering the link title includes 'Mac'? Maybe the name shouldn't include that, then? > Looks like the author believes that the tools make photo-editing much more beginner-friendly (and that is true), lowering the barrier and allowing more people to participate to the web (hence the open web). A $40 application running on a platform that thinks $1100 is appropriate entry-level pricing isn't lowering anyone's barriers to anything.
  - seltzered_ 7y ago
    Yes, you're expressing a rawer form of my comments intent. The point was to provoke thinking about other ecosystems, and possibly have a site that may shows gaps that may need to be filled, or areas where just a bit of polish could be done. Digressing, some of the gaps may be outside of apps/open web and more to do with infrastructure/pricing (see: https://catonmat.net/incredible-events-at-browserling https://catonmat.net/incredible-events-at-browserling (india and whatsapp), and as a slight contrast whatsapp-centrism in brazil: https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1340 https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1340 ). Some areas of the world, pragmatically at this point in time, may not be served better through mere 'open web' evangelism. In fairness, I make the same mistakes as the original author as someone who has works within an Apple-centric ecosystem and is in similar first-world social circles.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    > Maybe the name shouldn't include that, then? Why not? There are already a lot of resources for various other ecosystems. Should all PlayStation focused publications also include games for all platforms? Should Android Police talk about Symbian?

hilyen 7y ago

I feel like Visual Studio Code deserves a spot. Its open source, and free. Unlike a lot of the listed editors.

tracker1 7y ago
Agreed... I use it pretty much everywhere at this point. Others may load slightly faster, or perform slightly better.. but it's consistent with the best plugin ecosystem of any editor I've used and performs way better than any full on IDE by comparison with a fair share of the features.
sansnomme 7y ago
Indeed, most people seem to forget the dark ages before VS Code. When you were forced to choose between either slow heavy weights like Visual Studio/Intellij (and its relatives PyCharm et alia)/Eclipse that took forever to start up without a SSD drive or fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc. The latter requires tons of plugins and config to get anywhere near the featureset of the former while the former often seem to have way too many knobs hidden behind collapsible panels on the side. Sure, greybeards may dismiss this as "entitled thinking" when in the Good Ol' Days when people only needed ACME with no syntax highlighting or simply Ed. Sure, but you cannot deny the productivity boost of zero-config Intellisense autocompletion that works out of the box. Language Servers that get installed automatically with all it's dependencies etc. when the parent editor plugin is installed. Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell that required fiddling with PATH variables, jumping between FSF's poorly formatted documentation and the target language tooling. Do not mention its interaction with Python Virtualenvs; it still gives me nightmares. Getting Sublime Text working with stuff like Clojure etc. required tons of fiddling and watching YouTube videos that all differs slightly in methods. Many days were wasted editing Sublime Plugin configs and JSON files. VS Code forced editors like Atom etc. to up their game in performance, features, speed etc. Zero-config language setup and automatic prompting for installing plugins are now the norm thanks to the efforts of the wonderful VS Code team. The Vim plugin in VS Code is also second to none. Also, a shout-out to Sublime Text for kick-starting the lightweight editor revolution in the first place, with it's cross-platform TextMate style interface and its beautiful Monokai UI color scheme. Kudos! And for Lisp users, Light Table and Nightcode deserves praise for helping to modernize Lisp and demolishing Emacs' forced monopoly that turned off so many interested beginners. Well done Chris (and team) and Zach, thank you for bringing fresh blood and perspectives!

justinsaccount 7y ago

yes, help promote the open web by using proprietary tools on a proprietary platform

filoleg 7y ago
> proprietary tools What do you mean? The tools listed in OP are all open-source, which is the opposite of proprietary. I googled for the definition of "proprietary" prior to replying, because I thought I might have had it wrong, but wikipedia defines it as "closed-source software".[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software EDIT: I apologize, I was wrong, and a lot of the tools on the page are not open-source. I read the name of the website, clicked on a couple of projects, and they were open-source. So I assumed the rest was as well, given that + the name of the website.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  Except many of the tools listed are definitely not open source...
- rlt 7y ago
  Most of the tools referenced on https://macopenweb.com/ https://macopenweb.com/ are not open source.
- knd775 7y ago
  The majority of the tools on this web page are closed source.

ryanseys 7y ago

Maybe these open web apps should be built on the... open web?

mahesh_rm 7y ago

Plug: does anybody have anything good to recommend as a free/open source alternative to the featured: https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/ and https://www.svgator.com/ https://www.svgator.com/ for producing animated svg/canvas like these: https://tumult.com/hype/gallery/HerokuPlatformScale/HerokuPlatformScale.html https://tumult.com/hype/gallery/HerokuPlatformScale/HerokuPl...?

mdaniel 7y ago
Are you aware of AlternativeTo.net? https://alternativeto.net/software/svgator/?license=opensource https://alternativeto.net/software/svgator/?license=opensour...

st3fan 7y ago

Firefox is missing.

duxup 7y ago

What qualifies as "promote the open web"?

eugeniub 7y ago

Nothing quiet says "open web" like closed-source, proprietary, expensive applications like Pixelmator and Sublime Text.

jhawk28 7y ago
fits under the indie Mac application classification
jolmg 7y ago
s/quiet/quite/
phaer 7y ago
...running on a closed-source, proprietary and expensive platform
badsectoracula 7y ago
Pixelmator is 40 bucks, in what universe where someone who has the money to buy a Mac considers $40 for a professional application expensive?
- machinecoffee 7y ago
  And worth every penny IMHO. For me it hits the sweet spot between a massive feature filled Adobe product and struggling with e.g. Gimp for simple creation of icons.
- h1d 7y ago
  I thought Pixelmator's audience was general public and I think it does an excellent job at it. Perhaps Affinity series are targeted for professional and they're also one time purchase of something like $50. Great value.
SebastianKra 7y ago
Yes, the real open web is a magical place of rainbows, unicorns, and developers surviving on the power of friendship.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

knd775 7y ago

This list is honestly kind of embarrassing. Both the inclusions and glaring exclusions are just odd. How can most of these be considered to be "promot[ing] the open web"..?

reaperducer 7y ago
Both the inclusions and glaring exclusions are just odd. He included Panic's Coda, but not Transmit, or Prompt. I'd be hosed without that trio. If Panic made a database client, I'd drive to Portland and hand them a fist full of cash. That bunch of weirdos knows what its doing.
- Cenk 7y ago
  I have been very happy with Sequel Pro (https://www.sequelpro.com https://www.sequelpro.com), and not just because of the fantastic icon
  - h1d 7y ago
    Might want to consider using TablePlus instead as SequelPro has pretty much stalled development and MySQL 8 support hasn't been out for quite a while and their nightlies that supports it are too buggy to use. Also TablePlus supports quite a few number of databases.
    - Cenk 7y ago
      I’ve actually been using TablePlus as well, mainly for accessing a MSSQL database. I find it a bit awkward to use and not as fast as Sequel Pro, but nonetheless a useful and a good recommendation.
  - rimliu 7y ago
    There is also Querios https://www.araelium.com/querious https://www.araelium.com/querious.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    I ws always a fan of https://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/ https://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/

pcr910303 7y ago

Open Web != Free software. I like & try to support Free software (I'm writing this in a Linux laptop with Firefox & I try to donate to the GNU regularly), but the fact that some apps are the so-called 'closed-source, proprietary' apps doesn't disqualify them to contribute to the Open Web. Open Web (if I understood correctly) is more about lowering the barrier (skills & time) to participate to the web. Most of the apps qualify IMO. Things like Postgres.app or Pixelmator are the apps that directly match the category. I just don't understand why some 'Free software proponents' see proprietary apps as 'evil'. :-( Do all indie-programmers have to select between starving to death or working in a company that one can't enjoy? Can't s?he monetize the app/service s?he made?

zaksoup 7y ago
This is a great point and one of my biggest complaints with the hard-core FOSS/Copy-left software movement. More indie developers is a good thing, even if everything they make isn't necessarily all open source/free. As an aside, did you know that They/Them has been in use for centuries as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and often makes your text clearer and more readable when referring to a single person of unknown or unspecified gender?
- pcr910303 7y ago
  > As an aside, did you know that They/Them has been in use for centuries as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and often makes your text clearer and more readable when referring to a single person of unknown or unspecified gender? Oh, I couldn’t remind of they/them as I am not a native speaker of English. Thanks for pointing that out!

ernsheong 7y ago

As people are saying here, what is "promoting the open web"? Also, web apps basically dilute the list, maybe you should focus on native macOS/iOS apps to stay niche.

arvinsim 7y ago

Anyone here use RSS? Just curious on your setup since I find that using bookmarks is enough for me.

yoz-y 7y ago
I have very few sites that I check regularly in my rss reader (I use Feedly as aggregator and Reeder app for reading). A few blogs (Daring Fireball, CGP Grey's Blog, Stratechery, MacRumors) a few webcomic and so on. Some of them I just skim for headlines, and I put longer articles into Instapaper.
donatj 7y ago
As I started to use Facebook less and less I wanted a replacement for getting a nice curated mix of posts. I have happily started using RSS again after a long hiatus. Also there’s no internet in our bathroom at work so it’s been great to solve that.

donatj 7y ago

It’s borderline creepy how often I find a link and 24 hours later it shows up on Hacker News. Yesterday I was organizing some documents in Dropbox, found my ancient license for NetNewsWire. I wondered if they were still around, and did some Googling. Their GitHub has a link to macopenweb.com

naaaaak 7y ago

This list bills itself as "apps that help promote the open web", then lists apps that have relished in removing freedom of speech. For example, Overcast participated in the de-personing witchhunt of Alex Jones / Infowars by removing it from their directory, then celebrated on Twitter as if he was stamping out "hate speech". How is blatant political censorship worthy of "the open web"?