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Ten Years of Franz(meetfranz.com)
27 points by tosh 3 days ago | 15 comments
anonzzzies an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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!

cantalopes an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's electron, everything electron will always have these performance issues unfortunately

Btw actual solution for you might be plain old Pidgin

fithisux an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. I was tricked too.

shawn_w 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apparently not about the makers of Allegro Common Lisp¹ and assorted graph database tools.

1: https://franz.com/

bigbuppo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I too was confused.

yellow_lead an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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)

block_dagger 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

TylerE an hour ago | parent [-]

I always found the polyglot messengers a bit underwhelming - those sorts of programs inevitably end up focusing on the lowest common denominator feature sets.

smithcoin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

hypfer 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

fragmede 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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?

hypfer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, precisely. That was the point.

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.

fragmede 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

hypfer a minute ago | parent [-]

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

croes an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Paying customers isn’t a good measure.

Some people paid for this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich