Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Killing Its Mac App

512pixels.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 116 posts

Re: Twitter Killing Its Mac App

#81

Post by pharrington »

owenversteeg wrote: post #77
pharrington wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell from the issues, previous versions of his software loaded the chat service in question's website in a browser, and then either applied a custom stylesheet to the webpage or attempted to extract portions of the HTML content for display. 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 orde…

Look, it's an issues page, and it's one-man free software. He's a few days late with the update for a free piece of software, so what? The dude's earning $11 a month on Patreon. Give him a damn break. 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 tha…

I am quite familiar with one person free software projects. I use quite a few, and have released one myself. The variety and severity of problems in eul.im over such a short period of time is aberrant.

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.

Re: Twitter Killing Its Mac App

#82

Post by radley »

Maybe this is a good thing. My current Mac app will remain a "pure" Twitter app and I won't have to worry about it updating to include promotions, suggested tweets, and needless features (unless "stop supporting" means they're shutting off the API).

Re: Twitter Killing Its Mac App

#83

Post by artsnail »

I'm slightly curious what this means about the condition of Twitter as a business if an organization of their size doesn't want to spend the time/resources on maintaining this.

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.

Re: Twitter Killing Its Mac App

#84

Post by Hydraulix989 »

oldmancoyote wrote: post #72
kmfrk wrote: post #47

As a latecomer to macOS, Tweetie feels like a bygone era back when the default didn't seem to be Electron and web views. 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.

Given the sociopathic aspects of Twitter, maybe this is a good time to kiss it off. Maybe this is just the nudge we need.

Yes, Twitter as a campaign/marketing vehicle pretty much enabled the outcome of our last Presidential election.

Re: Twitter Killing Its Mac App

#86

Post by joejev »

artsnail wrote: post #83

I'm slightly curious what this means about the condition of Twitter as a business if an organization of their size doesn't want to spend the time/resources on maintaining this. 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.

Why does it matter if the users are high income? Twitter can still serve ads to low income users.

Re: Twitter Killing Its Mac App

#87

Post by rulum »

joejev wrote: post #86
artsnail wrote: post #83

I'm slightly curious what this means about the condition of Twitter as a business if an organization of their size doesn't want to spend the time/resources on maintaining this. 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.

Why does it matter if the users are high income? Twitter can still serve ads to low income users.

Ads are there to convert (sell stuff). Low income users buy less stuff. Also less expensive stuff. Ads catering to high income users tend to budget more for ads because they can be more lax with cost per user acquisition - their product has the margin to support it. All this leads to more income for twitter.

Re: Twitter Killing Its Mac App

#88

Post by rahoulb »

hengheng wrote: post #3

What does this app provide that a browser tab doesn't, other than a prominent spot in the Dock?

One of the greatest things about the Twitter native apps were that the guy who originally wrote them (Loren Brichter, who Twitter acqui-hired) literally invented the Pull-to-refresh gesture that is used everywhere nowadays.

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.

Re: Twitter Killing Its Mac App

#89

Post by eh78ssxv2f »

xenadu02 wrote: post #9
hengheng wrote: post #3

What does this app provide that a browser tab doesn't, other than a prominent spot in the Dock?

Better battery life? Lower memory usage? Integration with the platform conventions? 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…

> They do not solve any problem I as a user have.

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).

Re: Twitter Killing Its Mac App

#90

Post by andromedaworld »

deecewan wrote: post #68
khc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox container tabs to get around this

It's this built in to Firefox? I use session box in Chrome for a similar effect.

Bro, session box is such a handy recommendation. Didn't know of it till now. I typically have to use incognito and it's rather tedious.
Post reply on HN