Twitter Killing Its Mac App
512pixels.net
512pixels.net
I want to believe in online apps, but god, they all just suck so much, if not at launch, then a few years down the line.
Tweetdeck doesnt feel snappy at all.
Twitter is, very broken - for a very long time now.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Open standards, run your own if you want, nobody deprecating or discontinuing anything.
I've been quite active on Mastodon (@loke@functional.cafe) for the last several months, and enjoying it a lot.
It's not perfect, but it gives me more satisfaction than Twitter ever could.
The biggest problem with Mastodon at the moment is discoverability. It takes some effort finding the right people to follow but I've found a reasonable group of people who are interested in things like Emacs, Lisp etc.
A lot of people tend to boost interesting posts, and following people whose posts gets boosted allows you to grow your follow list with interesting posts.
Unfollowing people that keeps posting uninteresting things is also important of course.
Btw: Isn't ActivityPub the new OStatus?
Looking an Mastadon's policies makes me give up hope: https://mastodon.social/about/more
It's pretty snappy and weighs only 90 KB (!)
Twitter support is coming later this month.
Thanks! Looking forward to checking it out now :)
.27 is out tomorrow (there were delays). I'll send an email after the release.
1. I can't download past versions and there's no current version to download till tomorrow. Why...
2. You have no github and hn history besides spamming the shit of eul and I can't trust no proprietary third party shit.
4. Do you really think you can open source something that could bite your ass legally (whatsapp)? Will you partially open source all of it minus whatsapp or what? If so say it instead of "ye ye I will open source it".
5. Do you really think anyone not stupid believes you can support so much shit and being native and 90 KB (version 0.27 coming tomorrow) when the past versions downloaded a GB?
If you want to keep beslaver, do it, if you want to ban me, do it.
Think of it as an optimization problem. Even if all your points are correct, posting like you did above is to choose a local optimum (maximum sharpness for your points) over the global optimum (having an interesting community based on curiosity). That's a bad solution, especially since it's easy to make your substantive points in a civil way.
After checking out the guy and his project, it seems like he's really truly passionate about making minimal, fast software. I love it: I do a similar thing myself (I made the smallest, fastest CSS framework.) I can tell it in his comments and the effort he's put into this. It's a totally unique project, and as far as I can google, it's the only one of its kind. In a world of massive, bloated apps that eat gigs of RAM for breakfast it's a refreshing change.
The audience for something this minimal is fairly niche, and HN probably has the densest concentration of people for it. He's been mentioning it not very often, and only when it's relevant, which seems fair to me.
He's also clearly a very talented developer and put a ton of work into it. I have a feeling he'd like to make some money off it. I've been in a similar position myself, years ago: not sure whether to open-source or not because of the perpetual doubt in the back of your mind. I don't blame him: he's getting $11/month off Patreon.
The past versions thing doesn't matter IMO - after checking the Github, he says they don't work anymore. And the previous versions downloaded _half_ a gigabyte, apparently now it only downloads a few megabytes. Personally, the biggest thing that concerns me is the source: I'd have to see the source before I used it for anything.
Alex, if you'd like to talk about the world of FOSS, fast, minimal software, open-sourcing, and how to make money, feel free to send me an email - it's in my profile :)
eul.im literally never was minimal. He can keep saying it's minimal software, but until he produces something that both consistently works and doesn't consume orders of magnitude more storage than claimed, his words mean nothing. Again, current, literal reality is an issues page documenting myriad problems from crashes, blank screens, mangled displays, absence of advertised features, and claims of updated versions that still have not arrived.
Not to be grumpy to you, but I'd like to defend him. He's got an extremely noble goal. Those that "get it" really get it, and those that don't don't. I'm fed up with using several different shitty closed source apps that take up gigs of ram at a time, and I've tried to write my own version of what he's done, and I've failed at it. It's incredibly hard. Particularly because the companies are locked in a neverending cat and mouse trying to stop apps like this.
Also, based on everything I've seen off of RAM/CPU usage while running there's absolutely no way he's using an embedded webpage. I'd be happy to be corrected here though.
He claimed Discord support since 15/09/2017 - two months later, Discord support still wasn't available. He's been claiming since 28/09/2017 that he'd submit his app to Homebrew. As of four hours ago, he never said a peep to his mailing list about progress on the new version.
The app definitely used an embedded browser for authentication. That isn't speculation. He says the new version is rewritten to be a native app, as oppposed to what it was before. My assertion that the app used the browser for displaying content is speculation, but it is consistent with both the previous known behavior and the app's dysfunctions. The cool thing about software is that you can just examine the software to see what it does; too bad none of us will ever definitively know what his software did since he is deliberately hiding the previous versions from new eyes.
His history at best demonstrates incompetence. If the thing he is trying to do indeed is hard, than he is incompetent at doing a hard thing. One's reach exceeding his grasp is fine and necessary for personal growth - but in that case, do not lie and say you are delivering something you cannot deliver. If you are learning, say as much. Perhaps ask for help, perhaps keep previous attempts public so they can be analyzed by people trying something similar and by those with more experience. Perhaps upload your source code for the same reason. Do not put download links on your homepage that launch a popup saying there is no download.
I wasn't working on eul full-time. Now I am (starting this month). So the development process is going to be a lot faster.
The registration info is trivially available by searching the company #(11072989) on his website. He is a Netherlands resident who registered eul.im as a one person UK software company. At least 10,000 other companies use the same postal address as eul.im. The software in question, as everyone agrees, has no revenue model, and isn't even currently available for download. [text on website reads "Download v0.27 (out on Feb 17, for real, no more delays)"]. This precisely fits the pattern of a shell corporation.
I did this to get the code signing certificate primarily. For some reason it's really hard to get a personal certificate, there's a lot of bureaucracy, and the notaries I talked to said they couldn't help me verify the documents.
I registered it online in the UK because it literally took 6 minutes. I'll register it in the Netherlands later.
It wasn't available for download because it wasn't ready :) Now there's a working download link.
Thanks for your support :) I tried to answer to all concerns in this thread.
>I can't download past versions and there's no current version to download till tomorrow. Why...
Because it wasn't ready yet.
> Will you partially open source all of it minus whatsapp or what?
Yes, that's an option.
> Do you really think anyone not stupid believes you can support so much shit and being native and 90 KB (version 0.27 coming tomorrow) when the past versions downloaded a GB?
The past version downloaded a browser (150-400 MB depending on your OS) for authentication, which was really silly. Now it doesn't.
And yes, it actually is a 90 KB app :) Of course it will grow as more features are added, but it will never be more than 1 MB.
(typing that sentence out made me realize just how ridiculous Twitter app names really are :-) )
I would guess that the kinds of people who 1. use Macs and 2. decide to download the app are probably among some of Twitter's more engaged and higher-income users.
Also notifications used to show actually relevant notifications but nowadays it just displays retweets and tweets liked by others just like in my main feed and I haven't found a way to disable that.
1. If someone can make a better MacOS client, they should do so and charge for it!
2. Customers can probably pick up a free client from someone who wants to play around or pay a little more for a pro client
The whole situation is a mess.
Can't any client just read off the web version? Is there something preventing that?
Also technically it’s hard because it’s undocumented and they can change it at any time with no notice, which would cause your client to break.
Twitter killed off third party developers as ruthlessly as Nintendo killed third parties back in NES days.
Those left on Twitter are either bots or puppet/troll accounts.
Suggest a Twitter client that...
is not Electron based
shows tweets horizontally, maximizing number of tweets, minimizing scrolling
hides crap like images and video
shows replies as threads
Windows
Thanks
I don’t want to use Twitter in a tab.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Websites, wrapped web views, react native, et al solve a developer’s problem. They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse, the only question is how much worse. How much better are you forcing me to pay? How much cognitive tax am I paying?
I mean, webapps obviously have a positive value for you over the alternative of not using the service—otherwise you would be doing exactly that (and maybe using a competitor's service.)
At least personally, I appreciate first-class web-app versions of apps (with or without wrappers), since I use a not-very-popular OS and web-apps are basically the only way any company is ever going to give me a version of their software I can use.
That's a pretty broad statement. As a user, I hate installing apps. They take up disk space, and then I need to remember to remove them if I am not using it.
Also as a user, I am not sure how much additional security holes are created by installing a third-party binary. With a webapp, there is only a single source of security issues (browser).
Also the dock spot is important for my method of using windowing. The browser is for websites. I wouldn't want to mix it. I could banish twitter.com to a wrapper window with Fluid, but it's still just a crappy web app. I use Tweetbot instead. And before that Tweetie for Mac. Which was killed today. Fingers crossed that the API survives.
Before Twitter killed native clients by restricting their acccess tokens, they were an amazing place for people to try out new UI ideas - a really simple concept (one text area and a scrolling list) but a huge explosion of ways of presenting and interacting with it. Then twitter bought Tweetie and Twetdeck and restricted what the 3rd party clients could do and it all just died.
And I don't think it had a prominent spot in the dock... IIRC its icon was mainly in the menu bar.
It's been a while since I used tweetie or twitter, though, for very much at all. I'm really sorry to see it go away more because it used to be a nice UI playground for a talented developer than because of any recent experience with it.
Fortunately Tweetbot has that same feature now, so I've switched to it.
And then we'd all have lowest-common denominator crap. Imagine if Final Cut Pro were a web app. I much, much prefer Apple Mail to some Gmail webpage for instance. I also like apps to be able to actually take advantage of my hardware. Web browsers ought not be treated like de facto operating systems.
Web apps aren't the panacea they're being promoted as.
A lot of programmers these days have been brought up on JS and web technologies so they literally do not see any other solutions, regardless of how much better they may be.
• Windows: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-sho...
• Mac: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe...
What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group.
This is really a failing of our desktop window managers, not of web browsers: we need to separate the semantic concepts of "process" and "application", such that one process can be responsible for driving several applications, and choosing to "quit" an application can just result in an IPC message being sent to the process telling it that the user wants that window-group-context gone, rather than telling the window manager to go terminate the entire process.
(Such a feature would also greatly help with things like managing "non-rooted" Remote Desktop or X11 or virtual-machine windows. Right now, some of these use a workaround of generating a stub binary to register each foreign application for the local DWM's sake. But it's a leaky abstraction: Alt+Tab/Cmd+Tab to the proxy "application", and the RDP client/X server/VM "app" gets focus instead. If window-groups—with metadata for the name and icon of the "application" they represent—were something a process could publish to a DWM, rather than something the DWM tried to determine heuristically about an application process, all of these problems would go away. And, even without offering this up for webapps to use, browsers would benefit from this change: Chrome's "profiles" are exactly separate "application" window-groups in the same sense as apps under an X server or VM process.)
Works perfectly on windows. Let's say I pin Gmail as an app on the taskbar. When I open Gmail using that button, it remains attached to that taskbar button, which is an icon of Gmail for convenience. In fact it's not obvious to figure out that it's running on Chrome.
I'd rather not, thanks.
You are not Twitter’s customer. You are Twitter’s product.
If you don’t like that situation, tune out.