I thought it was the Lisp Franz and wondered what I missed as that's much, much older.
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 very slow (franz still consuming most energy); whatsapp is notably slower inside Franz than the separate one (they are both electron I think?).
Not Franz their fault, but I added Slack and literally spent 15 minutes solving Recaptcha'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.
Anyway; Not for me, but nice work sticking it out 10 years!
cantalopes 11 hours ago [-]
It's electron, everything electron will always have these performance issues unfortunately
Btw actual solution for you might be plain old Pidgin
Syzygies 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks for saving me the time.
I have email locally dating to the dawn of the internet; it's one form of external mind-mapping for me. I'm completely baffled that a decent mail program can't handle the mail for a small town, rather than struggling with one person's life history. This is a question of algorithm choices; performance has to be the top priority. If search is instant, who needs "features"?
Keyframe 3 hours ago [-]
per description it should've called AntiFranz then.
fithisux 11 hours ago [-]
Exactly. I was tricked too.
nchmy 47 minutes ago [-]
Glad to see Franz is still doing well.
I've been using the FOSS Ferdium (a fork of Ferdi, which was a fork of Franz) for many years, and generally find it to be a good experience. Anything annoying is surely inherent to electron and the services being connected to.
Founder of Franz here. Was surprised to find this on the front page this morning and I'm happy to answer your questions – there might be a slight delay as weekends are family time though.
block_dagger 12 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?
e12e 7 hours ago [-]
I'm using beeper - and it really lowers the mental overhead of tracking messages for me - I have some people on signal, some on messenger, some on sms, some use dms on discord.
It's great to have a single app that shows notifications and tracks conversations.
Much better than having to try and remember if my conversation with "Tom" was via sms or signal or something else; he might have a messenger account but not use the app - doesn't matter - I just open beeper and find the last conversation and continue from there.
Ed: I don't use beeper or messaging on desktop - so Franz is DOA for me.
Which is a shame - it looks like a solid product.
TylerE 11 hours 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.
smithcoin 12 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
flawn 9 hours ago [-]
Good old times, same for me. Just ended up not bothering and deactivating any additional services - digital detox time ＼ ( ° o ° ) ／
yellow_lead 11 hours ago [-]
Never heard of this product, but seems like Beeper, but more expensive if you want to use more than 3 messaging services.
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)
> Beeper is completely free, but the downside is it was acquired by Automattic
This is the cost of free.
Dylan16807 9 hours ago [-]
Nah, it can happen to any company.
adlk 8 hours ago [-]
Matt actually made an offer all those years back to bring Franz under their roof ;)
AbuAssar 9 hours 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's clearly AI generated, I want the prompt!
adlk 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, AI was heavily involved in building this but its literally impossible to share a set of prompts as it'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'd trust an LLM out of the box.
amelius 5 hours ago [-]
Honestly, we should move all messaging to e-mail. Yes, e-mail will need a few more features to make this practical, but those proposals exist.
drcongo 9 hours 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's bugs in a slightly crappier interface.
Edit: I should say it's not Franz that has the crappier interface, it's the Slack webview, Franz's interface seems pretty nice. However, if something wants to be the biggest app binary on my Mac outside of Xcode and Logic Pro, it needs to offer a lot more than this.
UKPakiRapeParty 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hypfer 12 hours ago [-]
I'm impressed that an electron wrapper around web.whatsapp.com and web.telegram.com could make it to 10 years.
Thanks ZIRP I guess.
fragmede 11 hours ago [-]
That's incredibly dismissive of a product that some people find valuable enough to pay money for it. I'm not sure what ZIRP has to do with that, the post states he didn't take VC funding. Is UX not important to you?
hypfer 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, precisely. That was the point.
Judging the product by its merits/substance and not by its storytelling/hype/hustle.
UX is important to me! That's why I do not use the inferior web client of telegram wrapped in electron but the real qt one.
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.
Almost feels like the good old times of presto-based opera.
dangus 3 hours ago [-]
Haters gonna hate. Link us to your company that you’ve been the CEO of for 10 years.
I don’t like the product either. But I can see why someone would buy it.
hypfer 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think that a dick measuring contest is in order here, but if you insist, just Google the username.
I've essentially created a whole niche of software from nothing. It is not an overstatement to say that the project has changed the world (to some degree, anyway).
Could've easily sold out with that but didn't. Make of that what you will.
But even if that all wasn't the case, none of my points would be invalid.
fragmede 10 hours 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/substance of the app.
hypfer 10 hours ago [-]
Nah, idc if it's electron or not.
What I do care about is if it is a _wrapper_ around someone else's application or not.
If you write your own whatsapp/telegram/whatever client, be my guest. But just taking someone else'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.
Impostorware
____
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.
Some random other person comes along, takes their stuff and receives all the credit.
Which, yeah, okay, utilizing market inefficiencies. So that's clever.
But it is also rather unethical.
In my book, anyway.
Your ethics may vary.
____
Having empathy is good and important and all, but you need to point it at the right people.
However, those rarely are the ones that are good at storytelling (in which Franz absolutely exceeds. Good job.)
Anyway. I repeat myself.
My point is that I think you might've automatically deployed a defense script, which is good in itself, but bad when you're being effectively manipulated into deploying it against your own interests.
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 very slow (franz still consuming most energy); whatsapp is notably slower inside Franz than the separate one (they are both electron I think?).
Not Franz their fault, but I added Slack and literally spent 15 minutes solving Recaptcha'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.
Anyway; Not for me, but nice work sticking it out 10 years!
Btw actual solution for you might be plain old Pidgin
I have email locally dating to the dawn of the internet; it's one form of external mind-mapping for me. I'm completely baffled that a decent mail program can't handle the mail for a small town, rather than struggling with one person's life history. This is a question of algorithm choices; performance has to be the top priority. If search is instant, who needs "features"?
I've been using the FOSS Ferdium (a fork of Ferdi, which was a fork of Franz) for many years, and generally find it to be a good experience. Anything annoying is surely inherent to electron and the services being connected to.
https://github.com/ferdium/ferdium-app
1: https://franz.com/
It's great to have a single app that shows notifications and tracks conversations.
Much better than having to try and remember if my conversation with "Tom" was via sms or signal or something else; he might have a messenger account but not use the app - doesn't matter - I just open beeper and find the last conversation and continue from there.
Ed: I don't use beeper or messaging on desktop - so Franz is DOA for me.
Which is a shame - it looks like a solid product.
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)
Not necessarily true but buried in their FAQ section https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-much-does-beeper-cost-to-use
This is the cost of free.
Edit: I should say it's not Franz that has the crappier interface, it's the Slack webview, Franz's interface seems pretty nice. However, if something wants to be the biggest app binary on my Mac outside of Xcode and Logic Pro, it needs to offer a lot more than this.
Thanks ZIRP I guess.
Judging the product by its merits/substance and not by its storytelling/hype/hustle.
UX is important to me! That's why I do not use the inferior web client of telegram wrapped in electron but the real qt one.
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.
Almost feels like the good old times of presto-based opera.
I don’t like the product either. But I can see why someone would buy it.
I've essentially created a whole niche of software from nothing. It is not an overstatement to say that the project has changed the world (to some degree, anyway).
Could've easily sold out with that but didn't. Make of that what you will.
But even if that all wasn't the case, none of my points would be invalid.
If you write your own whatsapp/telegram/whatever client, be my guest. But just taking someone else'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.
Impostorware
____
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.
Some random other person comes along, takes their stuff and receives all the credit.
Which, yeah, okay, utilizing market inefficiencies. So that's clever. But it is also rather unethical. In my book, anyway.
Your ethics may vary.
____
Having empathy is good and important and all, but you need to point it at the right people.
However, those rarely are the ones that are good at storytelling (in which Franz absolutely exceeds. Good job.)
Anyway. I repeat myself. My point is that I think you might've automatically deployed a defense script, which is good in itself, but bad when you're being effectively manipulated into deploying it against your own interests.
Which is.. well. ZIRP and its consequences
Some people paid for this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich