10 comments

  • anonzzzies2 hours ago
    I thought it was the Lisp Franz and wondered what I missed as that&#x27;s much, much older.<p>Anyway; I gave this a try (on Mac) and was not impressed; coming in at 1.44GB, immediately very slow and my battery almost immediately flagging it as the app using the most energy, I went through the setup; after the setup was done I was left with a blue empty screen and nothing to click on. So I killed it and started again; that opened my workspace without any messengers added (I added 3 during setup). So I added whatsapp and that resulted in a half screen whatsapp on top of that darkblue again with no options other then to kill the app. After restart, whatsapp was there and working, albeit <i>very</i> slow (franz still consuming most energy); whatsapp is notably slower inside Franz than the separate one (they are both electron I think?).<p>Not Franz their fault, but I added Slack and literally spent 15 minutes solving Recaptcha&#x27;s of buses over 50 of them, before it let me in... Wtf. I think Slack sucks at the best of times but this was very terrible.<p>Anyway; Not for me, but nice work sticking it out 10 years!
    • cantalopes1 hour ago
      It&#x27;s electron, everything electron will always have these performance issues unfortunately<p>Btw actual solution for you might be plain old Pidgin
    • fithisux2 hours ago
      Exactly. I was tricked too.
  • adlk11 minutes ago
    Founder of Franz here. Was surprised to find this on the front page this morning and I&#x27;m happy to answer your questions – there might be a slight delay as weekends are family time though.
  • shawn_w3 hours ago
    Apparently not about the makers of Allegro Common Lisp¹ and assorted graph database tools.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;franz.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;franz.com&#x2F;</a>
  • drcongo5 minutes ago
    I just tried it as Slack is such a bug-ridden piece of crap these days, unfortunately it just loads the Slack website in a view, so you get all the fun of Slack&#x27;s bugs in a slightly crappier interface.
  • AbuAssar40 minutes ago
    I wish the next stage of opensource is to opensource the prompt that generated the code, I like the main website style and it&#x27;s clearly AI generated, I want the prompt!
    • adlk7 minutes ago
      Yes, AI was heavily involved in building this but its literally impossible to share a set of prompts as it&#x27;s several hundred sessions over the course of months. Design, messaging, UX all those things are extremely important to me and this is nothing I&#x27;d trust an LLM out of the box.
  • yellow_lead1 hour ago
    Never heard of this product, but seems like Beeper, but more expensive if you want to use more than 3 messaging services.<p>Beeper is completely free, but the downside is it was acquired by Automattic (the WordPress company with the CEO who crashed out over WP Engine)
    • adlk5 minutes ago
      &gt; Beeper is completely free<p>Not necessarily true but buried in their FAQ section <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.beeper.com&#x2F;faq#how-much-does-beeper-cost-to-use" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.beeper.com&#x2F;faq#how-much-does-beeper-cost-to-use</a>
    • maccard32 minutes ago
      &gt; Beeper is completely free, but the downside is it was acquired by Automattic<p>This is the cost of free.
  • block_dagger3 hours ago
    Any Franz users here? How does the unification of multiple apps help with managing comms? Is it truly better than using the different native apps?
    • TylerE1 hour ago
      I always found the polyglot messengers a bit underwhelming - those sorts of programs inevitably end up focusing on the lowest common denominator feature sets.
  • UKPakiRapeParty31 minutes ago
    I never want to work for a company &#x2F; product dev like this.
  • smithcoin3 hours ago
    I used Franz and then went it went freemium I used ferdi for a while. I like using Zen browser and it’s based on Firefox
    • flawn6 minutes ago
      Good old times, same for me. Just ended up not bothering and deactivating any additional services - digital detox time \ ( ° o ° ) /
  • hypfer2 hours ago
    I&#x27;m impressed that an electron wrapper around web.whatsapp.com and web.telegram.com could make it to 10 years.<p>Thanks ZIRP I guess.
    • fragmede2 hours ago
      That&#x27;s incredibly dismissive of a product that some people find valuable enough to pay money for it. I&#x27;m not sure what ZIRP has to do with that, the post states he didn&#x27;t take VC funding. Is UX not important to you?
      • hypfer2 hours ago
        Yes, precisely. That was the point.<p>Judging the product by its merits&#x2F;substance and not by its storytelling&#x2F;hype&#x2F;hustle.<p>UX is important to me! That&#x27;s why I do not use the inferior web client of telegram wrapped in electron but the real qt one.<p>Or, alternatively, I just pin the tab in my browser. The UX is so good there, you can even do some surfing beside the chatting.<p>Almost feels like the good old times of presto-based opera.
        • fragmede1 hour ago
          If UX is important to you, how are you missing the point of the app? It seems you are going with the anti-hype against Electron apps and not engaging with the merits&#x2F;substance of the app.
          • hypfer52 minutes ago
            Nah, idc if it&#x27;s electron or not. What I do care about is if it is a _wrapper_ around someone else&#x27;s application or not.<p>If you write your own whatsapp&#x2F;telegram&#x2F;whatever client, be my guest. But just taking someone else&#x27;s product and bare-minimum repackaging it is not the level of merit that would warrant 10 years of literally anything; let alone asking for payment for it.<p>Impostorware<p>____<p>Also, just think about what a slap in the face this is for the people putting in the hard work of actually building the aforementioned web clients.<p>Some random other person comes along, takes their stuff and receives all the credit.<p>Which, yeah, okay, utilizing market inefficiencies. So that&#x27;s clever. But it is also rather unethical. In my book, anyway.<p>Your ethics may vary.<p>____<p>Having empathy is good and important and all, but you need to point it at the right people.<p>However, those rarely are the ones that are good at storytelling (in which Franz absolutely exceeds. Good job.)<p>Anyway. I repeat myself. My point is that I think you might&#x27;ve automatically deployed a defense script, which is good in itself, but bad when you&#x27;re being effectively manipulated into deploying it against your own interests.<p>Which is.. well. ZIRP and its consequences
      • croes2 hours ago
        Paying customers isn’t a good measure.<p>Some people paid for this<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;I_Am_Rich" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;I_Am_Rich</a>