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Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

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Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#112
post #23

Wow. I hate how so many Windows applications are considerably uglier compared to Mac counterparts. The Windows apps don't seem to push forward Windows design but rather get stuck in the Windows XP design days. This is beautifully designed and clear. The graph visualization is prime, and I love that the peaks are "rounded" out instead of sharp declines (sharp declines would make it look more like a live stock ticker).…

GitHub for Windows is another beautifully designed Windows app. They even published a blog post about it: https://github.com/blog/1151-designing-github-for-windows

It's a little over-simplified, I think. In migrating some technical writers to git, I thought it might be a good tool to introduce people to git.

I ran into 5 problems:

1. It spit out vague error messages, requiring repeating the action in the CLI to see git's actual, specific problem.

2. There's no option to do the initial clone via ssh, which was a problem because http was failing to download the full repository.

3. It can't do merges, so you end up needing to use the git CLI anyways.

4. It crashed repeatedly while trying to handle large (1GB) repositories. Very sluggish and occasionally unresponsive on smaller repositories, too, especially with large single commits.

5. Various minor bugs. People would ask me stuff like 'how do I discard changes?' and I'd discover they'd gotten into a state where the menu would not appear until the software was restarted. They found it difficult to know when something confusing was inherent or a bug.

I wanted to love it, because it looks like it's good for beginners. Unfortunately, being pretty is not the same as being easy to use.

Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#113
All software related to security should be open source. This particular piece of software doesn't sit at a crucial point in a secure system, but a greater deal of transparency would be appreciated. I personally avoid using closed-source tools for security purposes, and especially closed-source tools that are hoping to monetize. I use Linux, though, so I guess it doesn't really matter to me in this case :)

I would also say that calling home is a huge no-no for this software. I would seriously consider revisiting that choice if I were you.

Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#120

All software related to security should be open source. This particular piece of software doesn't sit at a crucial point in a secure system, but a greater deal of transparency would be appreciated. I personally avoid using closed-source tools for security purposes, and especially closed-source tools that are hoping to monetize. I use Linux, though, so I guess it doesn't really matter to me in this case :) I would als…

Thanks for your feedback. We'll try to add more transparency. The calling home is for software updates and it shows up on the graph, and GlassWire can even block itself.
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