alt Hacker NewsTen Years of Franz
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Glad to see Franz is still doing well.
I've been using the FOSS Ferdium (a fork of Ferdi, which was a fork of Franz) for many years, and generally find it to be a good experience. Anything annoying is surely inherent to electron and the services being connected to.
Apparently not about the makers of Allegro Common Lisp¹ and assorted graph database tools.
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.
Any Franz users here? How does the unification of multiple apps help with managing comms? Is it truly better than using the different native apps?
I used Franz and then went it went freemium I used ferdi for a while. I like using Zen browser and it’s based on Firefox
Never heard of this product, but seems like Beeper, but more expensive if you want to use more than 3 messaging services.
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)
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!
Honestly, we should move all messaging to e-mail. Yes, e-mail will need a few more features to make this practical, but those proposals exist.
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.
Edit: I should say it's not Franz that has the crappier interface, it's the Slack webview, Franz's interface seems pretty nice. However, if something wants to be the biggest app binary on my Mac outside of Xcode and Logic Pro, it needs to offer a lot more than this.
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I'm impressed that an electron wrapper around web.whatsapp.com and web.telegram.com could make it to 10 years.
Thanks ZIRP I guess.
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!