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I've spent the last two years building a new email client

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Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#171

Post by Siilwyn »

Kliment wrote: post #152
Etheryte wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is realistic. I wish people would stop perpetuating the myth that "That's just how Electron is" . It's perfectly possible to write Electron apps that don't automatically hog half a gig of RAM.

That's news to me, and people who make electron stuff tell me they can't get it down below a few hundred mb of memory usage. Can you point me to some resources about reducing that?

I'm curious too! I found one interesting article about Electron eating memory with images: http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#172

Post by croon »

coldtea wrote: post #155
brandonwamboldt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer VS Code over native alternatives. Don't conflate your anecdotal evidence with facts. Many users don't know much RAM a process consumes or what an Electron app is, they just care about what the app can do, how fast it is, etc.

> I prefer VS Code over native alternatives. That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives. If there was a native editor with feature parity with VS Code (including the number of plugins and dedicated MS resources speeding up its development, and free), nobody would be using it.

> If there was a native editor with feature parity with VS Code (including the number of plugins and dedicated MS resources speeding up its development, and free), nobody would be using it.

Is it possible that VS Code (for example) exists (in its feature specific incarnation ) only because Electron is a cost cutter in terms of portable development?

In other terms: Maybe the portable native full featured VS Code is the middle of the cheap-fast-good venn diagram.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#173

Post by lallysingh »

orwin wrote: post #86
SyneRyder wrote: post #34

This looks pretty cool, I'm really pleased to see people writing new email clients, and you've clearly worked very hard on this! I have a bunch of questions that I couldn't find out from the website (but are obscure enough that I shouldn't expect to): * Is this a purely native app, or an Electron / Javascript app? Personally I'm only interested in native apps & Electron would be a deal breaker - but I'm weird, most p…

You're not wrong on electron: this tech allow devs to be lazy and we all know that when we are allowed to be lazy, most of the time we are. That said, electron can have a small fingerprint if the dev team is carefull/good enough, and is hte best option when your app have to be able to read HTML (and copy HTML formatted string). To me, an email client is a good way to use electron for an app.

Re: lazy: some would call that get more stuff done faster and cheaper.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#174

Post by gsich »

api wrote: post #164
SyneRyder wrote: post #34

This looks pretty cool, I'm really pleased to see people writing new email clients, and you've clearly worked very hard on this! I have a bunch of questions that I couldn't find out from the website (but are obscure enough that I shouldn't expect to): * Is this a purely native app, or an Electron / Javascript app? Personally I'm only interested in native apps & Electron would be a deal breaker - but I'm weird, most p…

Every recent new app I can remember installing in the last year is Electron. Native UI is dead. It's more work and all it really buys you is the privilege of being tied forever to one platform or having to code your UI multiple times. The effort of writing your UI three times to use three different proprietary UIs would be better spent optimizing Electron for less resource use. In the long term web will totally repla…

One could have used e.g Qt.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#175

Post by gsich »

SquareWheel wrote: post #75
yani wrote: post #57

You are not weird. More and more people think that Electron is bad

This is an "all my friends voted for..." argument. Electron applications such as Slack, Discord, and VS Code have ballooned in popularity over the last year or two. Hacker News comments are not representative of the whole.

Slack is probably the best example for a bad Electron application. So slow.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#176

Post by muszc-master »

dogma1138 wrote: post #24

No offense but unless it’s a 1st party client email clients are something that is very hard to trust. Who controls your client has access to your inbox with most services even the few that have separate IMAP/POP3 passwords like Hushmail can be compromised through it. If your client also integrates with encryption or worse takes charge of it my encryption key is also now at risk. Lastly since email today is pure HTML…

The software runs completely on your desktop - your email & password is only sent between your computer and your email server. There are quite a few security measures in place that prevents HTML vulnerabilities, both built-in into Electron and others. I'd very much welcome an audit of the code from a respected firm!

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#177

Post by rootlocus »

coldtea wrote: post #155
brandonwamboldt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer VS Code over native alternatives. Don't conflate your anecdotal evidence with facts. Many users don't know much RAM a process consumes or what an Electron app is, they just care about what the app can do, how fast it is, etc.

> I prefer VS Code over native alternatives. That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives. If there was a native editor with feature parity with VS Code (including the number of plugins and dedicated MS resources speeding up its development, and free), nobody would be using it.

> That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives.

There is sublime text.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#178

Post by rootlocus »

coldtea wrote: post #156
Insanity wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean, you cannot see anyone preferring an Electron app over a native app?

All other things being equal of course not.

> All other things being equal

All other things will never be equal.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#179

Post by gsich »

dillondoyle wrote: post #49
crystaln wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? It's quite simple to tell what a web app does in my understanding. Chrome has many good monitoring tools.

The webapp can send your data wherever once it has the data, chrome won't log http requests if they were made server to server etc

A native application can do that too.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#180

Post by herbst »

muszc-master wrote: post #59
SyneRyder wrote: post #34

This looks pretty cool, I'm really pleased to see people writing new email clients, and you've clearly worked very hard on this! I have a bunch of questions that I couldn't find out from the website (but are obscure enough that I shouldn't expect to): * Is this a purely native app, or an Electron / Javascript app? Personally I'm only interested in native apps & Electron would be a deal breaker - but I'm weird, most p…

1. It's an Electron app, but it is built to use as little RAM as possible, when I run it on my old Macbook Air, it consumes only around 300mb of RAM maximum, which is less than what Finder consumes, and I consider everything over this limit to be a bug. 2. Currently not supporting Mbox/Maildir but downloading emails directly from the server, however an import of this is on the todo list 3. Re: turn off conversation v…

> only around 300mb of RAM maximum

For a email client that is still more than I ever would accept. Do you hold all conversations in the RAM for searchability or something?

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