161–170 of 289 posts
Looks great! This question is entirely unrelated, but the picture of you that you have on your site looks uncannily like the ones that they do for badges, with the white background and all. Is it one of those?
Hi HN! In the past, I spent over 7 years working on Apple Mail, and today I am really excited to share a new email client I'm building: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail. Mimestream is written in Swift, and uses AppKit+SwiftUI for a clean, stock appearance. It's designed to be fast, lightweight, and use a minimal amount of disk space. Mimestream's advantages over using the Gmail web interface includes…
Nice to see a native app and not something Electron-based. I wonder about native app viability these days though. Years ago I used native email apps like Outlook, KMail, and Thunderbird, but lately I just use the websites made by the service providers (Fastmail for personal, Gmail for work). As an open standards person I find my behavior kind of depressing, but the websites just tend to work better.
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Congrats on an amazing launch! You might though consider a new name before going to the App Store? Telling someone who doesn't read HN about your app would be very difficult because "mime" and "stream" aren't words people would expect next to each other. "Mime" is also a pretty uncommon word. Getting the early adopter crowd now who understand the name is important but this app has exciting potential I think for an au…
Thunderbirds aren't common in the wild either.
Nice to see a native app and not something Electron-based. I wonder about native app viability these days though. Years ago I used native email apps like Outlook, KMail, and Thunderbird, but lately I just use the websites made by the service providers (Fastmail for personal, Gmail for work). As an open standards person I find my behavior kind of depressing, but the websites just tend to work better.
There truly is no escape.
As another comment pointed out, can we have the ability to do like Priority Inbox or allow us to just show Unread + Flag (like Mail)?
After using emails for 20+ years, I'm pretty immune to all the jazz that comes with emails, and can survive pretty well. The only thing that I need now it the ability to see "Unread + Flagged". Please refer to my screenshot for how my Mail typically looks like -- https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos...
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It's nice to have a RESTful API, and nice to access to more Gmail features, but there are several aspects where it is not as efficient as it could be, and multiple round trips are required with the server to perform some basic tasks that IMAP can execute in 1 round trip. It also has pretty aggressive request throttling, which is fine for a very thin client like Mimestream, but would not be a good fit for a client tha…
Can you say a little more about the thinness and what the offline capabilities are? I noticed the search looks like it happens serverside which is great when you're online since you get actual gmail search. What happens when the client is offline?
When you're offline, you can view messages. However, only the most recent messages are cached in the account, and caching is run lazily with the background activity scheduler, which won't run if your device is under any kind of load and runs infrequently on battery. Overall, I eventually plan to offer a "days of mail" setting to make this more predictable.
You can also take actions on messages – marking them read, starring them, replying and sending new messages, etc. This is all architected to work while offline and replay when a connection becomes available. This design is necessary to make things seem snappy when the client is online.
Overall, I have not yet heavily tested the offline capabilities, and there is some work to do around the caching predictability story. If offline access is a very firm requirement, I would recommend a client designed around this model, like Mail.
