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Nylas Mail is now free

blog.nylas.com

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Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#191

Post by bpizzi »

cookiecaper wrote: post #135
mamcx wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fronts is the worst, except easy of build a cross-platform GUI (not necessarily native looking!). The thing is that is easy to get the basic widgets cross-platform but in the moment you need custom widgets or easy styling html/css just is easier. I wish exist a native renderer that could use a (saner, better) subset of html/css that fit the same use case, then let us use any better language for the logic. Prob…

JavaScript is NOT the first language to provide cross-platform GUI. Such toolkits are very old. Gtk, Qt, wxWidgets, and many others serve this functionality and have bindings across dozens of languages. There is no reason to use JavaScript just so you can get a "cross platform GUI".

> JavaScript is NOT the first language to provide cross-platform GUI.

Of course it's not.

> There is no reason to use JavaScript just so you can get a "cross platform GUI".

The main reason (imho) is that "JavaScript" (as you call it, but you should say "the web platform") is more future proof than "old toolkits".

Qt would be the best candidate for a "cross platform GUI", but you are relying on the [Qt company/nokia/whatever] for its continuation.

When you choose html/js you choose a standard used by virtually every single person with a computer nowadays. There is far less chance that html/js will be killed someday, like Microsoft killed WPF or like IBM made SWT an abandonware, because nobody is in that position and this whole World Wide Web thing rely on it.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#192

Post by blub »

mamcx wrote: post #167
cookiecaper wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is NOT the first language to provide cross-platform GUI. Such toolkits are very old. Gtk, Qt, wxWidgets, and many others serve this functionality and have bindings across dozens of languages. There is no reason to use JavaScript just so you can get a "cross platform GUI".

Is not about the first (and this is more about html/css than JavaScript). Is about the easier to work out, specially for custom styling and do custom widgets. Not get me wrong, I don't like much JS/html apart as be hostage as everyone else to use it in the web, but is clear that as far to build the GUI is way more enjoyable than most GUI toolkit.

I think you need to prove that a (custom) UI is easier to build with HTML/CSS compared to QML. Or even plain old QWidget.

It can't be that web developers have been bitterly complaining about how poor HTML and CSS are at building UIs for years and years and suddenly it's become easy and enjoyable.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#193

Post by cookiecaper »

lj3 wrote: post #95
cookiecaper wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still do not understand the fascination with JavaScript. SPAs, desktop apps like Electron, server-side stuff with Node, I just don't get it. JavaScript is the worst tool for the vast majority of these things. It brings us enough pain as the only practical client-side language on the web. Who deals with that and says "I need to write my server (or worse, desktop app) in this, and you know what, I'm going to now bast…

Javascript gets used everywhere because it successfully commoditized programming. It requires very little knowledge to get it to work, so anybody can pick it up without much effort. For businesses, this means an endless supply of cheap labor. Most people here on HN and elsewhere believe this is a good thing. It furthers their dreams of programming becoming a basic literacy, like english and math. Keep in mind I don't…

I don't think that JavaScript did that. I think web development in general did that, and continues to do that. JavaScript is only contributing insofar as JavaScript-based backends are inexplicably now becoming more employable than some much better alternatives (which not too long ago I would've also been deriding, but they look beautiful compared to node).

Until recently, and I know the "front-end devs" are going to have my head for this, but until recently, there was hardly any serious JavaScript coding going on even on the client-side. That means it wasn't something that a new developer would really stumble across and just start using to build full-fledged programs.

JavaScript's main use was extending web widgets to do things slightly more conveniently. All the heavy lifting would be behind the scenes and JavaScript would watch you type so it could autotab for you. So I don't think the explanation that there was a vast knowledgebase eager to break into the backend is plausible.

JavaScript was so disliked from horrifyingly frustrating exposure throughout the IE6 days that no one would go near the thing unless they were wrapped in the jQuery condom. John Resig was a hero of legendary bravery for biting the bullet and making JavaScript semi-usable.

Someone had to write a book called "JavaScript: The Good Parts" that openly acknowledged JavaScript's inherent inferiority but tried to cheer us up by saying "Hey, I know we're stuck with this because browser vendors will never be able to agree on something else, but there are some hidden cool things about it! Don't cry!"

Somehow in the last 5 years or so, JavaScript has gone from something that required a prophylactic device before anyone would approach it to something that real companies are writing production _DESKTOP_ applications in. What the heck happened?

(I think The Good Parts is probably the real turning point here, where it became OK to treat JavaScript as a non-joke, and that V8 accelerated it. But people took Crockford's feel-good apologia and ran way past the finish line with it.)

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#194

Post by dalanmiller »

How secure is it if I run the open source parts myself? Are my emails stored unencrypted on the server itself?

Also if I access my email largely from my phone, would I have any significant advantages?

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#195

Post by spang »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #93

I love Nylas, and I've recommended it to people in the past. But what new funding model has enabled this change?

No new funding model, just better tech! In the new version, we don't sync and store all of your email on our servers, which dramatically drops the cost of running the service.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#196

Post by blub »

bpizzi wrote: post #191
cookiecaper wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is NOT the first language to provide cross-platform GUI. Such toolkits are very old. Gtk, Qt, wxWidgets, and many others serve this functionality and have bindings across dozens of languages. There is no reason to use JavaScript just so you can get a "cross platform GUI".

> JavaScript is NOT the first language to provide cross-platform GUI. Of course it's not. > There is no reason to use JavaScript just so you can get a "cross platform GUI". The main reason (imho) is that "JavaScript" (as you call it, but you should say "the web platform") is more future proof than "old toolkits". Qt would be the best candidate for a "cross platform GUI", but you are relying on the [Qt company/nokia/w…

Your message left me scratching my head.

How can JS be more future-proof than old UI toolkits when JS libraries and frameworks are constantly changing? Sure, nobody will kill HTML and JS, but that's not the point. Nobody knows how UIs will be built with web technologies in two years!

Edit: based on your reply below, it looks like I have to spell it out. GUIs are built with UI frameworks, not just with programming languages and markup languages. JS frameworks are so short-lived that one can't be sure if their code will still work in one year.

That is the opposite of future-proof.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#197

Post by tracker1 »

thatcat wrote: post #178
jcranmer wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your recipients use email clients that don't load remote http images except on demand. I can think of one email client with ~15 million users that does that.

Which client blocks remote images by default? Is it a cli or gui?

Gemail, Outlook.com/hotmail, thunderbird and outlook all block images, unless whitelisted... Now, there may be other providers/clients that don't, but the above accounts for a significant number of users (if not most western mail users).

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#198

Post by wodenokoto »

ryanSrich wrote: post #143
dorian-graph wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly common to not have a link to their homepage—I have no idea why.

It's a medium blog. They don't allow you to add external links anywhere outside of a post. I suppose you could create a new post, add links in that post, and then add that link to the nav of the blog.

Yes they do. There is a link to the download/purchase page in the header of the blog.

And even if this was impossible, they could make their name in the body of the blog post a link to their website.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#199

Post by pgm8705 »

nkkollaw wrote: post #166

How is this different than Mail and every other email client in existence? Don't get me wrong, it looks extremely good. However, I visited the site and immediately clicked on the back button. I've been using Google Inbox for a few months, and it radically changed how I handle my many mailboxes. It's not rare now that I actually achieve inbox zero. I would love to see the same amount of innovation that was put into Go…

I love Google Inbox as well. The one downside that bothers me is its performance. It can be very slow and tends to gobble up resources the longer you have the tab open. I'm constantly on the lookout for a native desktop app that matches its features and ease of use.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#200

Post by bpizzi »

cookiecaper wrote: post #64
g105b wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble isn't electron/webkit, it's the tonne of JavaScript frameworks that are used to emulate what HTTP already does very efficiently (pages, links, requests, responses, etc.). One day someone will build a good Electron app.

I still do not understand the fascination with JavaScript. SPAs, desktop apps like Electron, server-side stuff with Node, I just don't get it. JavaScript is the worst tool for the vast majority of these things. It brings us enough pain as the only practical client-side language on the web. Who deals with that and says "I need to write my server (or worse, desktop app) in this, and you know what, I'm going to now bast…

> It brings us enough pain as the only practical client-side language on the web.

That's plainly wrong.

The list of praticals client-side language on the web is actually pretty vast: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu....

Of course you can't write a piece of, say, typescript, and just include it in your HTML and call it a day. You need to compile it first, and you need some tooling for that, but it's not different from using a C++ compiler for building a Qt application.

> Every time I try to get someone to explain it to me I'm just met with a bunch of empty answers like "Yeah it just flows really well man".

Well, actually it flows really well indeed :)

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