Comment by written-beyond
1 year ago
Without sounding like every other developer who hates on electron, I would really appreciate an http client with a Gui that was lighter, like iced or slint.
I appreciate the versatility of electron and it giving us beautiful and usable apps but I have 16 GB of ram, I can't upgrade it and I genuinely have multi second hangs after I have 3 instances of VSCode, Firefox and Chrome open along with Bruno.
> Without sounding like every other developer who hates on electron, I would really appreciate an http client with a Gui that was lighter, like iced or slint.
How much would you be willing to pay for such a client?
I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know, because as an independent developer, every single time I suggest a native application using native widgets to a client, they choose the HTML interface rather than a Qt or similar based interface.
The easily doable pretty animations in CSS in a 800MB-in-RAM-while-running application is, to paying clients, preferable than a 50MB-in-RAM-while-running that doesn't have the fancy spinning, tilting, animated wizz-bangs.
I have been writing software professionally since the mid-90s; I can do you a quick GUI-based cross-platform HTTP send+receive application based on libcurl in about 2 weeks. Looking at the minimum I need to make to pay my bills, I need purchasers paying a cumulative 1000USD for this effort, so 10x buyers @ $100, or 100 buyers @ $10, and so forth.
And, of course, I'd expect to only be able to sell it for a short while, if it is popular, until a clone starts up with $40k worth of SEO and advertising money.
The software you want can be had, and the skill to make it exists, in a timeframe that is feasible, but the economics are just not there.
This is a good business perspective, but I don’t really see why this couldn’t be someone’s open source passion project. The comment wasn’t really implying that they needed a paid tool, just a tool that suits their needs and is lightweight. Plenty of the software I use on a daily basis is open source software where you could argue that the economics shouldn’t have been there.
> Plenty of the software I use on a daily basis is open source software where you could argue that the economics shouldn’t have been there.
Me too. But the problem with "the economics just aren't there" means that if I cannot get, just from word-of-mouth (say, a Show HN post) 100 users @ $10 once-off lifetime purchase, then this is not a product that is in demand anyway. An open-source/free product that is exactly the same would similarly receive no love from users.
IOW, if not enough users exist for this product at $10, not enough users exist for this product at $0. Your passion product will still result in the dev burning out on the fact that no one wants their passion enough.
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You see the problem in your comment:
why this couldn’t be SOMEONE’S ELSE passion project
HTML/CSS can still be used for the frontend even without Electron. Some frameworks use the OS bundled web renderer instead:
- For Rust apps: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri
- For Go apps: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails
I think you can also easily do the pretty animations in a 50mb in ram "native" application
Yes, you can, especially if you use Qt with QML like I do[1][2][3].
[1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/blog/orchids.mp4
[2] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor
[3] https://www.get-notes.com/
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Bruno is nice because unlike postman all the calls are defined in files that you can add to the git of your project.
Only thing I don't like about Bruno is that you cannot generate a documentation from your api call tests.
Bruno was supposed to free us from the other bad guy, then they added a subscription too. Fuck Bruno I guess.
I find this funny from people that make their living from $$ from software! Lol
But apart from that Bruno is open source (MIT), you can fork it and have it anyway you want…
The paid option seems just like the traditional open source model of make software free but offer enterprise support. And given that CTOs tent to want to pay for stuff (postman is terrible nowadays but is still picked and paid for) why would Bruno straight up say no to money?
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Are there non-binary versions of Bruno?
https://github.com/usebruno/bruno has the source code. It's a node app so i guess by binary you mean a way to run it without the normal electron wrapper? You should be able to run it standalone though i've never tried it outside it's normal distribution method.
Sounds like you're looking for https://yaak.app/.
that's close but it uses Tauri, which maybe lighter than electron but we're still running an instance of a web browser/web view
Why is webview a problem? I hear this a lot but not sure why (with the exception of gtk WebKit on Linux which has legit perf issues). We’re on web right now and I’ve never heard anyone complain hackernews is sluggish and that they want a native app instead (or rather 5 native apps minimum for the big OSs).
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There's a TUI application out there that might be up your alley, but I can't remember what it's called...
EDIT: There's one called Posting which seems to be the most popular: https://github.com/darrenburns/posting
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Yes, Tauri isn't that much different than Electron. I also bundles Node JS to power Yaak's plugin system, which makes it even more similar.
I think Electron gets a bad rep mostly because big companies use it to build low quality apps.
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> Without sounding like every other developer who hates on electron
Electron is hated for very good reasons. Postman in particular is just so insanely bloated and sluggish, it's painful to use on anything that doesn't have a higher end CPU.
I haven't tried it but there is Posting in a TUI: https://github.com/darrenburns/posting
uvx posting
https://posting.sh
I know it misses the sweetspot you are looking for, but have you tried curl?