3 ms·

Switching to ripcord on my laptop was a breath of fresh air. I always wonder why don't these companies develop proper desktop clients that dont wreck mid range

Switching to ripcord on my laptop was a breath of fresh air. I always wonder why don't these companies develop proper desktop clients that dont wreck mid range laptops...

SkyMarshal 7y ago
For anyone else who didn't know about Ripcord: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ Their first marketing bullet: "It's not made from a web browser" :D
bmurphy1976 7y ago
I never heard of ripcord. I just downloaded it and gave it a try. It suffers the same problems as every single native (non-electron) chat client I've ever used. Primarily it's hideous and you can't change the UI size uniformly. As an older dev who's eye sight isn't as good as it was 30 years ago when I started, it's getting harder and harder to use native apps because the default fonts are so goddamn small. Oh sure, you can dork around in the font preferences dialog and change some things, but there is no option to scale all of the UI (UI => Scale => 120%). It ends up being a hodgepodge of unreadable small text mixed with reasonably sized by but poorly styled and colored larger text that's nearly as hard to read because of the lack of space separating elements. Of course everything gets more crowded when you increase the size, instead of doing what it should do and also increasing the space between elements to let everything breath. In an Electron app, I can Ctrl-+, Ctrl-+ and everything looks great. I have yet to find a single native app that I use regularly where this isn't an issue. The only ones that comes close (no surprise here) is Sublime Text. These problems just don't happen with Electron apps. Electron technology may be slower than native, but it sure nails UI scaling. I'll take a UI I can actually see over one that runs more efficiently any day.
- tumult 7y ago
  You can set `QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2` (or whatever) as an environment variable and the entire UI will scale. But by default, it should be trying to use your desktop scaling and DPI settings -- you might want to try changing those, first.
  - bmurphy1976 7y ago
    I'm using a mac. QT_SCALE_FACTOR doesn't really help, and most of Apple's native apps are actually sized appropriately. It's everything else that's a problem. Honestly, I think it's an accessibility issue. Most devs are simply used to the small GUIs, so that's what they build. They don't give it any real thought or put any actual design effort into it. It's the same with accessibility, it's not my problem so it's not a problem. And while native GUI's help with some aspects of accessibility, they don't provide the tools to make scaling easy and obvious so it doesn't happen. And that's why people throw fits about software being inaccessible, because it's literally unusable for them. I'm lucky, I just want everything to be 20% bigger by default because it makes my life a little easier. Others don't have that luxury. That 20% can be the difference between being able to use your software or not.
    - jancsika 7y ago
      > Honestly, I think it's an accessibility issue. Even just focusing on the usability of zooming in a browser-- I wonder how much even the best Linux desktop environment (or even OSX) trails behind browsers. Off the top of my head: * the obvious keybindings (even across browsers?) that are the same for tabs/windows regardless of the content inside them * in FF the zoom percentage animates itself into existence when you go below or above 100%, then remains viewable and clickable to return to normal * most of the popular web pages are designed for zooming so that text reflows in a readable manner when zoomed * when zooming, fonts remain readable without the user fudging around with DPI or rendering settings that no mortal ought to understand * zoom level and scroll position is remembered in case I click the back button Well, the desktop doesn't even have a notion of the back button so I'd say we're already at least a few years ahead of the desktop.
- wmf 7y ago
  Or you could change your screen resolution?
  - bmurphy1976 7y ago
    That's a terrible solution. I chose my monitor specifically because it's HIDPI, not high resolution. It's easier on my eyes to read smoothly rendered text in HIDPI than jaggedly rendered text all day long. Changing the resolution subverts that.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      If you're using macOS, have you tried changing the screen resolution? On HiDPI monitors it doesn't produce "jaggedly rendered text" at all (in fact, Apple ships a number of laptops with this as the default configuration…)
      - bmurphy1976 7y ago
        Yes, and it makes the apps that are sized appropriately for the default Mac resolution too big. It's an accessibility problem, not a resolution problem. Electron apps don't have this issue because you can resize each app individually to match your needs/screen settings. You can't do this with most native apps.
- ben509 7y ago
  That's an interesting point. I think I'm 10 years behind you and I've definitely found myself bumping the font size in Emacs and generally avoiding many squinty apps without really thinking about it. The solutions for UI element size tend to be aimed at good eye-sight or nearly blind with little in between.
- cgh 7y ago
  From the Ripcord site: "Features - Not made from a web browser"
rvz 7y ago
So Ripcord is created by one person in his spare time and it performs blazingly-fast and supports Slack whilst Slack's own client is maintained by tens if not hundreds of engineers and it still performs slower when joining more teams, consumes significant amounts of RAM and they create this blog-post about performance improvements whilst still using Electron. Understanding on why Slack is unable to create a performant desktop-client for their users is beyond me. I also wasn't able to use Slack and Discord at the same time on my MacBook without it swapping on the SSD. So Ripcord seems to be a good lightweight alternative for me. I just wish it supported Keybase Chat so I can ditch that Electron garbage too.
- geofft 7y ago
  I would love to see someone study this from a management / human factors perspective. I can think of all sorts of reasons why a team can't perform as well as an individual, ranging from the team needing to support more use cases than the individual does (onboarding via the web was super important for Slack's growth, I'd bet), everyone thinking it's not their place to rethink some major decision, some major decision being rethought but execution stuck in a team that isn't performing well, etc. And I'd be really curious, if you were in charge of a large organization, how to make it as effective as a single person (while still handling all the broad edge cases that large organizations do handle). I suspect that "Why is Linux competitive with Windows" has many of the same answers, in the end.

Switching to ripcord on my laptop was a breath of fresh air. I always wonder why don't these companies develop proper desktop clients that dont wreck mid range laptops...

SkyMarshal 7y ago

For anyone else who didn't know about Ripcord: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ Their first marketing bullet: "It's not made from a web browser" :D

bmurphy1976 7y ago

I never heard of ripcord. I just downloaded it and gave it a try. It suffers the same problems as every single native (non-electron) chat client I've ever used. Primarily it's hideous and you can't change the UI size uniformly. As an older dev who's eye sight isn't as good as it was 30 years ago when I started, it's getting harder and harder to use native apps because the default fonts are so goddamn small. Oh sure, you can dork around in the font preferences dialog and change some things, but there is no option to scale all of the UI (UI => Scale => 120%). It ends up being a hodgepodge of unreadable small text mixed with reasonably sized by but poorly styled and colored larger text that's nearly as hard to read because of the lack of space separating elements. Of course everything gets more crowded when you increase the size, instead of doing what it should do and also increasing the space between elements to let everything breath. In an Electron app, I can Ctrl-+, Ctrl-+ and everything looks great. I have yet to find a single native app that I use regularly where this isn't an issue. The only ones that comes close (no surprise here) is Sublime Text. These problems just don't happen with Electron apps. Electron technology may be slower than native, but it sure nails UI scaling. I'll take a UI I can actually see over one that runs more efficiently any day.

tumult 7y ago
You can set `QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2` (or whatever) as an environment variable and the entire UI will scale. But by default, it should be trying to use your desktop scaling and DPI settings -- you might want to try changing those, first.
- bmurphy1976 7y ago
  I'm using a mac. QT_SCALE_FACTOR doesn't really help, and most of Apple's native apps are actually sized appropriately. It's everything else that's a problem. Honestly, I think it's an accessibility issue. Most devs are simply used to the small GUIs, so that's what they build. They don't give it any real thought or put any actual design effort into it. It's the same with accessibility, it's not my problem so it's not a problem. And while native GUI's help with some aspects of accessibility, they don't provide the tools to make scaling easy and obvious so it doesn't happen. And that's why people throw fits about software being inaccessible, because it's literally unusable for them. I'm lucky, I just want everything to be 20% bigger by default because it makes my life a little easier. Others don't have that luxury. That 20% can be the difference between being able to use your software or not.
  - jancsika 7y ago
    > Honestly, I think it's an accessibility issue. Even just focusing on the usability of zooming in a browser-- I wonder how much even the best Linux desktop environment (or even OSX) trails behind browsers. Off the top of my head: * the obvious keybindings (even across browsers?) that are the same for tabs/windows regardless of the content inside them * in FF the zoom percentage animates itself into existence when you go below or above 100%, then remains viewable and clickable to return to normal * most of the popular web pages are designed for zooming so that text reflows in a readable manner when zoomed * when zooming, fonts remain readable without the user fudging around with DPI or rendering settings that no mortal ought to understand * zoom level and scroll position is remembered in case I click the back button Well, the desktop doesn't even have a notion of the back button so I'd say we're already at least a few years ahead of the desktop.
wmf 7y ago
Or you could change your screen resolution?
- bmurphy1976 7y ago
  That's a terrible solution. I chose my monitor specifically because it's HIDPI, not high resolution. It's easier on my eyes to read smoothly rendered text in HIDPI than jaggedly rendered text all day long. Changing the resolution subverts that.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    If you're using macOS, have you tried changing the screen resolution? On HiDPI monitors it doesn't produce "jaggedly rendered text" at all (in fact, Apple ships a number of laptops with this as the default configuration…)
    - bmurphy1976 7y ago
      Yes, and it makes the apps that are sized appropriately for the default Mac resolution too big. It's an accessibility problem, not a resolution problem. Electron apps don't have this issue because you can resize each app individually to match your needs/screen settings. You can't do this with most native apps.
ben509 7y ago
That's an interesting point. I think I'm 10 years behind you and I've definitely found myself bumping the font size in Emacs and generally avoiding many squinty apps without really thinking about it. The solutions for UI element size tend to be aimed at good eye-sight or nearly blind with little in between.
cgh 7y ago
From the Ripcord site: "Features - Not made from a web browser"

rvz 7y ago

So Ripcord is created by one person in his spare time and it performs blazingly-fast and supports Slack whilst Slack's own client is maintained by tens if not hundreds of engineers and it still performs slower when joining more teams, consumes significant amounts of RAM and they create this blog-post about performance improvements whilst still using Electron. Understanding on why Slack is unable to create a performant desktop-client for their users is beyond me. I also wasn't able to use Slack and Discord at the same time on my MacBook without it swapping on the SSD. So Ripcord seems to be a good lightweight alternative for me. I just wish it supported Keybase Chat so I can ditch that Electron garbage too.

geofft 7y ago
I would love to see someone study this from a management / human factors perspective. I can think of all sorts of reasons why a team can't perform as well as an individual, ranging from the team needing to support more use cases than the individual does (onboarding via the web was super important for Slack's growth, I'd bet), everyone thinking it's not their place to rethink some major decision, some major decision being rethought but execution stuck in a team that isn't performing well, etc. And I'd be really curious, if you were in charge of a large organization, how to make it as effective as a single person (while still handling all the broad edge cases that large organizations do handle). I suspect that "Why is Linux competitive with Windows" has many of the same answers, in the end.