I thought it was the Lisp Franz and wondered what I missed as that's much, much older.
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!
Founder of Franz here. Was surprised to find this on the front page this morning and I'm happy to answer your questions – there might be a slight delay as weekends are family time though.
I just tried it as Slack is such a bug-ridden piece of crap these days, unfortunately it just loads the Slack website in a view, so you get all the fun of Slack's bugs in a slightly crappier interface.
I wish the next stage of opensource is to opensource the prompt that generated the code, I like the main website style and it's clearly AI generated, I want the prompt!
Yes, AI was heavily involved in building this but its literally impossible to share a set of prompts as it's several hundred sessions over the course of months. Design, messaging, UX all those things are extremely important to me and this is nothing I'd trust an LLM out of the box.
I always found the polyglot messengers a bit underwhelming - those sorts of programs inevitably end up focusing on the lowest common denominator feature sets.
That's incredibly dismissive of a product that some people find valuable enough to pay money for it. I'm not sure what ZIRP has to do with that, the post states he didn't take VC funding. Is UX not important to you?
If UX is important to you, how are you missing the point of the app? It seems you are going with the anti-hype against Electron apps and not engaging with the merits/substance of the app.
Nah, idc if it's electron or not.
What I do care about is if it is a _wrapper_ around someone else's application or not.
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
____
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.
____
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.
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
1: https://franz.com/
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.
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
____
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.
____
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich