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That's a good point. There's definitely ways to optimize for less memory usage. We've been prioritizing feature development, but plan to focus on this before we

That's a good point. There's definitely ways to optimize for less memory usage. We've been prioritizing feature development, but plan to focus on this before we start scaling.

trinix912 6y ago
This should be a very high priority issue. The more features you'll add, the harder it'll be to perform any heavy optimizations without rewriting major parts. ~150MB is a huge memory footprint for something that just sits in my menubar idle. Not all Macs have >16GBs of RAM (and even if they did, this is pretty wasteful). I'm also concerned about the battery life. I'm pretty sure you'll eventually reach a point where it's no longer possible to optimize it any more (nonetheless Electron is just a Chrome instance). If you suddenly realize the whole thing would be twice as good if you'd just make a native app instead, it's better to have no features than have to rewrite all of them. I know this doesn't sound constructive, but why go with Electron in first place? It's a menubar widget which the users are expected to be running all the time. There's a difference between running a simple applet and a whole browser instance.
- hazz99 6y ago
  I don’t think it should be very high priority for them. They’re a startup, they need to focus on the fastest and most effective way to create value for their users, today. No point optimising the product if the company dies before it starts slowing down.
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    If they aren't a "good platform citizen" at the beginning, it's unlikely they will be later on. This might be something they're willing to accept as it's unlikely to affect them directly, but in aggregate, every growth-focused startup building is JS today because it's quick, will result in high powered machines being saturated with slow software. I suspect the effect will be that Apple gets hate for not making fast enough computers with enough battery life, and people reluctantly spend another $1500 on a laptop after 2 years because it's too slow. My advice to the company would be that their target device is almost certainly the base model MacBook Air with 8GB RAM running Slack, a large Excel spreadsheet, and Chrome with 100 tabs of Gmail and documents, and that if they aren't _lightning_ fast on that now they need to optimise soon, because they'll get slower over time.

That's a good point. There's definitely ways to optimize for less memory usage. We've been prioritizing feature development, but plan to focus on this before we start scaling.

trinix912 6y ago

This should be a very high priority issue. The more features you'll add, the harder it'll be to perform any heavy optimizations without rewriting major parts. ~150MB is a huge memory footprint for something that just sits in my menubar idle. Not all Macs have >16GBs of RAM (and even if they did, this is pretty wasteful). I'm also concerned about the battery life. I'm pretty sure you'll eventually reach a point where it's no longer possible to optimize it any more (nonetheless Electron is just a Chrome instance). If you suddenly realize the whole thing would be twice as good if you'd just make a native app instead, it's better to have no features than have to rewrite all of them. I know this doesn't sound constructive, but why go with Electron in first place? It's a menubar widget which the users are expected to be running all the time. There's a difference between running a simple applet and a whole browser instance.

hazz99 6y ago
I don’t think it should be very high priority for them. They’re a startup, they need to focus on the fastest and most effective way to create value for their users, today. No point optimising the product if the company dies before it starts slowing down.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  If they aren't a "good platform citizen" at the beginning, it's unlikely they will be later on. This might be something they're willing to accept as it's unlikely to affect them directly, but in aggregate, every growth-focused startup building is JS today because it's quick, will result in high powered machines being saturated with slow software. I suspect the effect will be that Apple gets hate for not making fast enough computers with enough battery life, and people reluctantly spend another $1500 on a laptop after 2 years because it's too slow. My advice to the company would be that their target device is almost certainly the base model MacBook Air with 8GB RAM running Slack, a large Excel spreadsheet, and Chrome with 100 tabs of Gmail and documents, and that if they aren't _lightning_ fast on that now they need to optimise soon, because they'll get slower over time.