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> and of the ones somewhat lacking in this department there are no native apps with feature parity to compare against (i.e. for Slack https://cancel.fm/ripcord

> and of the ones somewhat lacking in this department there are no native apps with feature parity to compare against (i.e. for Slack https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ literally developed by one person in Qt Widgets, covers both Slack and Discord, the installed size of the AppImage on linux is 30 megabytes $ smem -k | grep ripcord jcelerier ripcord 0 60.2M 63.6M 84.9M with a dozen slack workspaces open and ~20 tabs

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Ripcord is lovely, I'm a paying customer[0] and highly recommend it. I used it for years with Slack, and have only good things to say about the experience. It's also a living proof that all the bloat in Slack and similar apps is absolutely not necessary. That said, the issue with Ripcord and similar is that they're all living on borrowed time - and using them means risking your own account. It's only a matter of time before Slack and Discord start to ban people using alternate clients - and then poof, Ripcord is dead. -- [0] - Fancy way of saying "bought a license when the dev finally enabled throwing some money towards them".
- antihero 5y ago
  > It's only a matter of time before Slack and Discord start to ban people using alternate clients Pretty sure in the case of Slack that their business customers will have words when a bunch of their developers can't suddently communicate with the business...
  - void_mint 5y ago
    I'd wager those devs will be told to use the official Slack client.
    - antihero 5y ago
      So there’s no loss to using ripcord in the mean time.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        There isn't, as long as you're willing to tolerate the risk of getting your account banned for blatant ToS violation. Companies like Slack tend to ban first, ask question never, and good luck reaching customer support if you aren't a paying business customer. (FWIW, I judged the risk was wort the effort in my case, and was a happy Ripcord user for the years I had to use Slack.)
westoncb 5y ago
That's pretty awesome, hadn't heard of it before. That said, I think it's important to consider how much development time is spent on iterating as a new product's design is figured out. The company developing Slack has probably done the net work of building it 20 times over as its feature set developed and morphed over the years—and I'm sure Slack's actual complete feature set eclipses Ripcords (most of the difference coming in via features not essential to most individual users, but key to the business). The workspace and tab counts are also hard to read much meaning from since most of the memory usage is dependent on the media that's been loaded into the app. How many web page previews, videos, images, etc. are in those tabs? In any case, at the end of the day our sample sizes here are just too small to draw the conclusions people on here so often do about Electron. We know you can move fast with it (development speed), and that apps built with it can be fast (e.g. VSCode, Github desktop client, Discord)—but people can also build slow apps with it (no surprise), and there is a somewhat large constant factor for install size (~50mb base). In my mind that does not stack up to merit the kind of complaints about Electron that can be found here every day.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  You raise very good points, that together make the picture even more complex :). > The company developing Slack has probably done the net work of building it 20 times over as its feature set developed and morphed over the years That's definitely true, especially in areas where they were innovating (or at least experimenting with features that were not common in the space). There's a cost to R&D, and I'll agree that preferring velocity is important to minimize that cost, which justifies the use of "nice for devs, bad for UX" tools[0]. > I'm sure Slack's actual complete feature set eclipses Ripcords That's true. Ripcord doesn't replicate Slack 1:1, there were few "sparkly" that were cut (at least when I used it ~2 years ago), and of course a lot of the chrome that got removed could be considered features by some. But at least by metric of productivity, Ripcord's UX eclipses that of Slack. > (most of the difference coming in via features not essential to most individual users, but key to the business) In this particular case, I'd say it was 90% just removal of resource-intensive bloat. But that's a good observation in general: one of the reasons some users are dissatisfied with official apps is because of what they[2] deem as user-hostile features, existing to exploit the user instead of aiding them. Obviously, they're put there because they're the key to the business. Plenty of obviously bad UX can be easily explained when one looks at how the vendor actually makes money. > How many web page previews, videos, images, etc. are in those tabs? Ripcord either doesn't load those or is lazy about it. But when it does, you at least get the full picture, instead of having to click through some gallery-like popup interface :). > apps built with [Electron] can be fast (e.g. VSCode, Github desktop client, Discord) People will contest with you here because they're using a different reference point for "fast". VSCode is impressively fast... for an Electron app. Not so much in comparison to desktop-native apps implementing equivalent features. And that's the one well-known exception, a typical Electron application is noticeably slower and more resource-intensive than an equivalent desktop app. > large constant factor for install size (~50mb base) This is not something that people care about unless you're doing something silly, like an Electron TODO app that weighs 50MB and uses many times more of RAM, where the reference comparison is against a WinAPI app that would weigh 50 kilobytes and use not much more of memory. This is also why people don't generally complain about VS Code being Electron - it actually makes good use of all the features its platform offers. But most Electron apps? Picking Electron saves developers a little bit of time, at the cost of heavy resource tax for all users. That's annoying. Especially if you have experience with native software that gives you reference points to compare. -- [0] - I'm definitely guilty of this myself. At my previous job, I developed a prototype for 2.0 version of the company's flagship product in two weeks, in... ObservableHQ[1]. The actual work to reimplement those features in our product took almost a year. I did joke we should probably ship the prototype in the meantime (especially given that our main competitor was an Excel plugin), but we never seriously considered that. [1] - https://observablehq.com/ https://observablehq.com/ [2] - And when I say "they", I also mean myself in most such discussions.
Const-me 5y ago
Thanks so much for that link! They got my €18 immediately after I managed to change font sizes and typefaces to the ones I like.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Ripcord is lovely, I'm a paying customer[0] and highly recommend it. I used it for years with Slack, and have only good things to say about the experience. It's also a living proof that all the bloat in Slack and similar apps is absolutely not necessary. That said, the issue with Ripcord and similar is that they're all living on borrowed time - and using them means risking your own account. It's only a matter of time before Slack and Discord start to ban people using alternate clients - and then poof, Ripcord is dead. -- [0] - Fancy way of saying "bought a license when the dev finally enabled throwing some money towards them".

antihero 5y ago
> It's only a matter of time before Slack and Discord start to ban people using alternate clients Pretty sure in the case of Slack that their business customers will have words when a bunch of their developers can't suddently communicate with the business...
- void_mint 5y ago
  I'd wager those devs will be told to use the official Slack client.
  - antihero 5y ago
    So there’s no loss to using ripcord in the mean time.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      There isn't, as long as you're willing to tolerate the risk of getting your account banned for blatant ToS violation. Companies like Slack tend to ban first, ask question never, and good luck reaching customer support if you aren't a paying business customer. (FWIW, I judged the risk was wort the effort in my case, and was a happy Ripcord user for the years I had to use Slack.)

westoncb 5y ago

That's pretty awesome, hadn't heard of it before. That said, I think it's important to consider how much development time is spent on iterating as a new product's design is figured out. The company developing Slack has probably done the net work of building it 20 times over as its feature set developed and morphed over the years—and I'm sure Slack's actual complete feature set eclipses Ripcords (most of the difference coming in via features not essential to most individual users, but key to the business). The workspace and tab counts are also hard to read much meaning from since most of the memory usage is dependent on the media that's been loaded into the app. How many web page previews, videos, images, etc. are in those tabs? In any case, at the end of the day our sample sizes here are just too small to draw the conclusions people on here so often do about Electron. We know you can move fast with it (development speed), and that apps built with it can be fast (e.g. VSCode, Github desktop client, Discord)—but people can also build slow apps with it (no surprise), and there is a somewhat large constant factor for install size (~50mb base). In my mind that does not stack up to merit the kind of complaints about Electron that can be found here every day.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
You raise very good points, that together make the picture even more complex :). > The company developing Slack has probably done the net work of building it 20 times over as its feature set developed and morphed over the years That's definitely true, especially in areas where they were innovating (or at least experimenting with features that were not common in the space). There's a cost to R&D, and I'll agree that preferring velocity is important to minimize that cost, which justifies the use of "nice for devs, bad for UX" tools[0]. > I'm sure Slack's actual complete feature set eclipses Ripcords That's true. Ripcord doesn't replicate Slack 1:1, there were few "sparkly" that were cut (at least when I used it ~2 years ago), and of course a lot of the chrome that got removed could be considered features by some. But at least by metric of productivity, Ripcord's UX eclipses that of Slack. > (most of the difference coming in via features not essential to most individual users, but key to the business) In this particular case, I'd say it was 90% just removal of resource-intensive bloat. But that's a good observation in general: one of the reasons some users are dissatisfied with official apps is because of what they[2] deem as user-hostile features, existing to exploit the user instead of aiding them. Obviously, they're put there because they're the key to the business. Plenty of obviously bad UX can be easily explained when one looks at how the vendor actually makes money. > How many web page previews, videos, images, etc. are in those tabs? Ripcord either doesn't load those or is lazy about it. But when it does, you at least get the full picture, instead of having to click through some gallery-like popup interface :). > apps built with [Electron] can be fast (e.g. VSCode, Github desktop client, Discord) People will contest with you here because they're using a different reference point for "fast". VSCode is impressively fast... for an Electron app. Not so much in comparison to desktop-native apps implementing equivalent features. And that's the one well-known exception, a typical Electron application is noticeably slower and more resource-intensive than an equivalent desktop app. > large constant factor for install size (~50mb base) This is not something that people care about unless you're doing something silly, like an Electron TODO app that weighs 50MB and uses many times more of RAM, where the reference comparison is against a WinAPI app that would weigh 50 kilobytes and use not much more of memory. This is also why people don't generally complain about VS Code being Electron - it actually makes good use of all the features its platform offers. But most Electron apps? Picking Electron saves developers a little bit of time, at the cost of heavy resource tax for all users. That's annoying. Especially if you have experience with native software that gives you reference points to compare. -- [0] - I'm definitely guilty of this myself. At my previous job, I developed a prototype for 2.0 version of the company's flagship product in two weeks, in... ObservableHQ[1]. The actual work to reimplement those features in our product took almost a year. I did joke we should probably ship the prototype in the meantime (especially given that our main competitor was an Excel plugin), but we never seriously considered that. [1] - https://observablehq.com/ https://observablehq.com/ [2] - And when I say "they", I also mean myself in most such discussions.

Const-me 5y ago

Thanks so much for that link! They got my €18 immediately after I managed to change font sizes and typefaces to the ones I like.