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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

#421

Post by tjoff »

collyw wrote: post #65
dri_ft wrote: post #38

God bless you for working in a space—native email clients—which seems utterly neglected nowadays.

I can kind of see why. There is a lot of convenience in being able to log into any computer and access your mail. Plus Gmail search beats the search in native clients most of the time.

Gmail search is without doubt the worst search I've ever come across. It doesn't even return all the results.

Why do you think it is good?

There is nothing that says that you can't have both web and native mail clients.

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

#422

Post by lilyball »

tomc1985 wrote: post #412
dhruvb14 wrote: post #406

I find it crazy that everyone is harping on Electron instead of the cool features that this clearly has that most clients do not. Demo looked pretty polished dude. Don't let the typical HN crowd rain on your parade. The fact that you posted an actual product out to the public is more than most can say. Also: If you can't spare Max 300MB ram and you are complaining on HN wtf computer do you use?

My compute resources are not an all-you-can-eat buffet. I'm sick of inconsiderate developers writing software in wasteful frameworks that waste my electricity and time. You can make pretty x-platform apps in JavaFX, QT Quick, GTK, hell even Lazarus, and they don't eat CPU and memory like Electron does. It is a shame that nearly every app released in the latter half of this decade is just wasteful Electron garbage. Do…

300mb? You're lucky. Slack is taking up 763mb for me right now, and it's not uncommon to see it cross the 1GB threshold.

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

#423

Post by markbnj »

tomc1985 wrote: post #412
dhruvb14 wrote: post #406

I find it crazy that everyone is harping on Electron instead of the cool features that this clearly has that most clients do not. Demo looked pretty polished dude. Don't let the typical HN crowd rain on your parade. The fact that you posted an actual product out to the public is more than most can say. Also: If you can't spare Max 300MB ram and you are complaining on HN wtf computer do you use?

My compute resources are not an all-you-can-eat buffet. I'm sick of inconsiderate developers writing software in wasteful frameworks that waste my electricity and time. You can make pretty x-platform apps in JavaFX, QT Quick, GTK, hell even Lazarus, and they don't eat CPU and memory like Electron does. It is a shame that nearly every app released in the latter half of this decade is just wasteful Electron garbage. Do…

Pretty harsh lol. If you don't like electron apps then don't run them. It's hard to describe the actions of developers who use those frameworks as "inconsiderate" when they are a) providing the fruit of their labors for free; and b) not shoving it down your throat.

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

#424

Post by cbhl »

tomc1985 wrote: post #412
dhruvb14 wrote: post #406

I find it crazy that everyone is harping on Electron instead of the cool features that this clearly has that most clients do not. Demo looked pretty polished dude. Don't let the typical HN crowd rain on your parade. The fact that you posted an actual product out to the public is more than most can say. Also: If you can't spare Max 300MB ram and you are complaining on HN wtf computer do you use?

My compute resources are not an all-you-can-eat buffet. I'm sick of inconsiderate developers writing software in wasteful frameworks that waste my electricity and time. You can make pretty x-platform apps in JavaFX, QT Quick, GTK, hell even Lazarus, and they don't eat CPU and memory like Electron does. It is a shame that nearly every app released in the latter half of this decade is just wasteful Electron garbage. Do…

I really don't think the problem is Electron, or even JavaScript.

I think the problem is Chrome, which the Electron runtime requires. Each separate Electron app has its own copy of Chromium in memory. (What happened to shared libs?)

I see two ways you can help:

(1) you can try to get memory-usage-reducing fixes into Chromium, or,

(2) you can build an Electron-compatible runtime that uses less memory (maybe by transpiling it into code that runs on a native toolkit, and not having a static copy of that runtime per-app).

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

#425

Post by deagle50 »

15charlimit wrote: post #413
deagle50 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you can help me understand the outcry over Electron memory usage, especially on HH. I can't remember the last time I ran out of memory on my laptop or desktop unintentionally. Seems to me battery life and jank should be main areas of focus. You can have a 2GB if you cut CPU usage and typing latency.

Just because you "can" use a bunch of memory without issues now doesn't mean you "should" not make any attempts to cut resource usage whenever possible.

Of course you're right. But why does it seem like memory usage takes precedence over battery life and latency? I may be in the minority, but it seems to me a native app's key advantage over Electron is performance/watt and I don't see how reduced memory usage would help.

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

#426

Post by StevenRayOrr »

Exuma wrote: post #384
muszc-master wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry if it came across as manipulative. One of the reasons for having it like this is also so it can give me a metric on who in the waiting list are most interested in the program. And of course also to offer an incentive to share it.

That is not a good metric. There's no way I would take part in that even if I were interested. It's just a big turn off.

Your first sentence isn't supported by your second and third. It is incredibly common to track not just interest but level of interest -- and lots of companies find it a valuable metric for marshalling their resources. Is this perhaps not the best way to get that metric? Now that can be a helpful question to ask and a good thing for this dev to think about, rather than outright dismissing the attempt.

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

#427

Post by mike-cardwell »

chrismorgan wrote: post #313
mike-cardwell wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced that JMAP existing will make it easier for people to develop things like Ivelope. I don't know in this particular case, but if I were writing Ivelope I wouldn't first write an IMAP library of my own. I'd use an existing one. And all commonly used languages have pre-existing IMAP libraries anyway. I doubt the ability to do "var client = new JMAP()" instead of "var client = new IMAP()" will lead to a…

I perceive that you haven’t ever tried programming against IMAP or making a MUA, or not seriously at least. IMAP is a mess if you try to do much beyond the basic “retrieve list of folders, retrieve messages, now just leave it alone”; and most IMAP client libraries are worse than IMAP need be. There are many extensions for many features, poorly supported in various clients and servers, and various things that are slow…

"I perceive that you haven’t ever tried programming against IMAP or making a MUA, or not seriously at least."

Unfortunately for you, your perception is wrong. Writing an IMAP client library is my go-to project when I'm learning a new network stack / language. I am very familiar with the way it works and it's various problems, and have been paid to write software that uses it.

I am not as familiar with JMAP, but I did look into it a year or so ago. I recall at the time that it didn't seem to solve that many problems, and introduced problems that I never previously had when working with IMAP. I triggered a discussion on the IETF mailing list regarding one of these problems (https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/jmap/7dSQsqRBJ_YlZ7wF8...). Somebody said at the time that they would look into modifying the protocol to address that problem, but to me (and I could be wrong) it looks like this hasn't happened.

My basic perspective on JMAP is: It doesn't fix enough problems to justify the massive increase in pain it would cause developers of mail clients by having to support both IMAP and JMAP at the same time. I'm totally on-board with replacing IMAP with something better. But it needs to be a lot better, or we should just stick with IMAP. To me, JMAP just looks like it will cause more problems than it solves.

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

#428

Post by Barraketh »

CryoLogic wrote: post #410
dhruvb14 wrote: post #406

I find it crazy that everyone is harping on Electron instead of the cool features that this clearly has that most clients do not. Demo looked pretty polished dude. Don't let the typical HN crowd rain on your parade. The fact that you posted an actual product out to the public is more than most can say. Also: If you can't spare Max 300MB ram and you are complaining on HN wtf computer do you use?

Half of Hackernews is discussion about six figure tech salaries, the other half is complaints about 300mb (aka ~$2) ram being to expensive for an app. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9864/price-of-ddr4-memory-dro...

Yup, but we're all running these apps on laptops, which have a fixed amount of RAM that is sometimes impossible to increase (looking at you, Apple)

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

#429

Post by allenz »

CryoLogic wrote: post #410
dhruvb14 wrote: post #406

I find it crazy that everyone is harping on Electron instead of the cool features that this clearly has that most clients do not. Demo looked pretty polished dude. Don't let the typical HN crowd rain on your parade. The fact that you posted an actual product out to the public is more than most can say. Also: If you can't spare Max 300MB ram and you are complaining on HN wtf computer do you use?

Half of Hackernews is discussion about six figure tech salaries, the other half is complaints about 300mb (aka ~$2) ram being to expensive for an app. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9864/price-of-ddr4-memory-dro...

To be fair, RAM is much more expensive to upgrade on MacBooks and other premium laptops.
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