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Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

marta.yanex.org

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Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#41

Post by yanex »

dogma1138 wrote: post #37
yanex wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marta author here. I agree with you that the open source software has higher level of trust than the proprietary one, but I afraid I just can't maintain Marta steadily for a long time if it was open-sourced (and then forever free). And I doubt the community will do that instead of me. In case if you're interested, I expressed my thoughts about this here [1] earlier. I do promise, though, that Marta will never collect…

Is there a reason to not license it under a dual license? Have the source code open with a non commercial license and also distribute the binaries under a commercial license. I’m not sure that it will have a significant impact on the revenue since most people would likely opt out and purchase the binary rather than building it on their own.

According to what I know, in case of desktop applications, the revenue drops almost to zero, unless you have a Free and Pro versions. "Free edition" then lacks almost all features that make the product competitive, and it's not really good.

It's reasonable, though, if your potential user base is totally different. For example, IntelliJ IDEA has a Community edition that lacks enterprise frameworks support, but that's not a problem for "single users" because they basically don't do any enterprise. But it looks like it won't work for Marta.

So I'd rather choose the Sublime Text strategy (though I think that Sublime costs too much).

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#42

Post by saagarjha »

So, I see a plugin API for this, as well as a sample Swift plugin: https://github.com/marta-file-manager/HelloWorldPlugin. How are you making this work? As far as I know, creating plugins in Swift is a bad idea because trying to load two of them with incompatible runtimes (a likely possibility, since Swift doesn't have a stable ABI) would cause bad things to happen.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#44

Post by yanex »

saagarjha wrote: post #42

So, I see a plugin API for this, as well as a sample Swift plugin: https://github.com/marta-file-manager/HelloWorldPlugin . How are you making this work? As far as I know, creating plugins in Swift is a bad idea because trying to load two of them with incompatible runtimes (a likely possibility, since Swift doesn't have a stable ABI) would cause bad things to happen.

Well, until Swift introduces ABI compatibility, this is definitely a problem, as both Marta API and a plugin need to be built with the same version of Swift.

Depending on the Swift release roadmap, I'll postpone 1.0 until the release of Swift 5, or make the API ObjC-compatible.

I also have plans for making a "lightweight API" (possibly in Lua). It will support only the subset of features available in the "full API", but if that would be sufficient, nothing prevents it from becoming the "right" way of writing plugins for Marta. (In any case, Swift API won't disappear).

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#45

Post by carlesfe »

yeasayer wrote: post #7

I don't like that file operations are controlled by F1-F8 keys. This UX is unfriendly to macOS environment. Most users' F-row is in media keys mode by default, so you have to hold Fn otherwise. And I'm not even taking into account the Touch Bar.

You can use software like Karabiner to change the default behavior of F keys for specific apps. In my case, function keys behave as F1-F10 in Terminal, Virtualbox, Pycharm and Dosbox, for example.

Not sure about the touch bar though.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#46

Post by yanex »

nodesocket wrote: post #43

Marta looks super nice, but I very hesitant to replace native Finder. I wish Apple would do a complete rewrite of Finder and update it, instead of bolting on these iOS type changes and new applications.

You can use both :) Some of my friends use Finder for simple things like opening the downloaded file, and Marta for advanced file operations.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#47

Post by userbinator »

Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but I correctly guessed from the domain name and later, the contents of the page, that [1] the author is Russian, and [2] the file manager resembles the layout of FAR, another file manager of Russian origin and seemingly very popular among them.

In short, what is it with Russians and this type of file manager? It's a very curious association.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#48

Post by WalterGR »

Numberwang wrote: post #18

The queue thing is something I've always wanted for Windows. Probably for the last 15 years I've wondered why they have't added this and made it a default.

What? Windows 8 introduced this - and it's better than what's shown in the Marta screenshot.

https://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/itw...

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#49

Post by gukov »

userbinator wrote: post #47

Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but I correctly guessed from the domain name and later, the contents of the page, that [1] the author is Russian, and [2] the file manager resembles the layout of FAR, another file manager of Russian origin and seemingly very popular among them. In short, what is it with Russians and this type of file manager? It's a very curious association.

Norton Commander as well. Russians favour brutal simplicity.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#50

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

yanex wrote: post #35
Digital-Citizen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the case (and I take it the absence of a source code repository is how you're reaching your conclusion), that's ironic. The Marta webpage linked to this story includes "Because I want to own what I pay money for." yet one never truly owns proprietary software regardless of price; one can never really tell what it is doing, and users are prohibited from inspecting the program to find out, as well as sharing…

Marta author here. I agree with you that the open source software has higher level of trust than the proprietary one, but I afraid I just can't maintain Marta steadily for a long time if it was open-sourced (and then forever free). And I doubt the community will do that instead of me. In case if you're interested, I expressed my thoughts about this here [1] earlier. I do promise, though, that Marta will never collect…

Personally, I'm happy to pay for high quality software as I understand someone needs to be paid in order to maintain it, but I like having access to the source in order to reduce risk and maintain more control over my environment.

I think it's possible to release the source and still sell the app, Textual [0] seems like a good example of that. The make my favorite IRC client. Although I'm not sure if the author is that well off or not.

Maybe I'm just an outlier.

[0] https://www.codeux.com/textual/

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