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

ivelope.com

411–420 of 608 posts

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

#411
post #405

Would be nice to see a feature comparison with Thunderbird. What exactly can this do that Thunderbird can't?

To give some examples: quick-move folders, conversation view, feed view, one click filter-creation and newsletter/promo filter

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

#412

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. Don't forget your 300+mb needs to sit along side Slack's 300mb, Discord's 300mb, and so on... fuck even my Crashplan Backup client eats up three processes and another 300mb. It's inconsiderate as hell.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my update to the comment. Its memory footprint is greater than I expected. I shan’t pursue it any further at present, I was mostly just curious to get an initial feel for it. Taking it (or something like it) to a polished product is something I’d like to do, but I’ve got other, much more important things to do on FastMail and Topicbox, and I don’t think anyone else in the company feels strongly about it, so it’s…

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.

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

#414

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?

Thanks for your feedback!

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

#415
post #356
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that support HTML email and images? If not, it seems like a different domain entirely. Other people in this thread have posted Thunderbird numbers and they're in the ballpark. After all, it is rendered in Gecko similarly to how ivelope is rendered in Electron.

Remote images in email is an anti-feature[0]. And if the images are attached to the email, why not just use an image viewer? Does your email client support video playback? [0]: https://senglehardt.com/papers/pets18_email_tracking.pdf

Because sometimes discussion centers in and around the images, as in discussion of analysis figures.

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

#417

I put my name on the waitlist, but instantly lost interest and confidence by: “Jump forward 5 steps in the line for every person you invite and get beta access sooner.” Why? If the product is that good I’ll evangelize it. This is a desktop application, so I don’t see a big boost from a network effect. All this does makes me wonder if the product is more about building hype than value

You are not alone in this attitude, so don't take this personally, but I'm going to reply to you because you're the top comment. This is an incredibly destructive point of view. Promotion is essential to any software project, even open source, and in the vast majority of cases, word of mouth is not enough. This is an ethical, up-front, straightforward ask that costs you and anyone you might contact very little and is optional in any case. He's a solo developer. Cut him some slack.

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

#418
post #416

Quite a challenge you chose for yourself, I respect that! There are very, very few passable email clients in this world: Thunderbird, Mail.app (macOS and iOS) and GMail Web client.

Indeed it was and is. My goal is to put Ivelope on that list

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

#419
post #376

I put my name on the waitlist, but instantly lost interest and confidence by: “Jump forward 5 steps in the line for every person you invite and get beta access sooner.” Why? If the product is that good I’ll evangelize it. This is a desktop application, so I don’t see a big boost from a network effect. All this does makes me wonder if the product is more about building hype than value

I dislike tricks like this too, especially because in the end you're still going to get access to it. If a product is good enough, as you said, then I'll tell everyone about it. I think technical or non-business people see this kind of trick and perhaps don't think of the deeper consequences of it - it's not quite a dark pattern, though it feels manipulative.

What deeper consequences are those?

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

#420

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...

and what about people who use electron apps that aren't silicon valley programmers?
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