It seems like this has been a while coming. The Mac app still hadn't been updated to support 280 characters when I finally ditched it a couple weeks ago (in favor of Tweetbot). If they couldn't push out a change like that in 3 months, the app has probably not been maintained for quite a while.
I also ditched a few weeks ago for Tweetbot. The official Twitter app still uses square avatars and, the real killer bug, no longer supports pictures. pic.twitter.com links just send you to the tweet recursively.
I tried Twitter a long time ago, and never enjoyed it.
I've been quite active on Mastodon (@loke@functional.cafe) for the last several months, and enjoying it a lot.
It's not perfect, but it gives me more satisfaction than Twitter ever could.
The biggest problem with Mastodon at the moment is discoverability. It takes some effort finding the right people to follow but I've found a reasonable group of people who are interested in things like Emacs, Lisp etc.
I joined an instance which focuses on the things I'm interested in, and look at the local timeline. That timeline contains original posts (i.e. not replies) posted from that instance. I'd follow pretty much anyone posting anything remotely interesting.
A lot of people tend to boost interesting posts, and following people whose posts gets boosted allows you to grow your follow list with interesting posts.
Unfollowing people that keeps posting uninteresting things is also important of course.
Personally if I have to jump from Twitter, I'm more likely to switch to Micro.blog [1]. Everything is posted to your own site as an RSS post, and it already has iPhone and Mac apps. And of course, it has an API for making your own apps.
So, alternatives? I have Twitter on the side next to my browser. Using Twitter in a separate window doesn't work because Twitter for the web isn't mobile friendly and mobile.twitter.com doesn't refresh if the window isn't in focus.
Hey, I signed up for the mailing list a few weeks ago (before .27, i remember wanting to wait until it was native), but I didn't get an email about .27. Did you send one, or did it get lost somewhere on the way?
I'm calling bullshit on you, your shenanigans and all of the blind idiots.
1. I can't download past versions and there's no current version to download till tomorrow. Why...
2. You have no github and hn history besides spamming the shit of eul and I can't trust no proprietary third party shit.
4. Do you really think you can open source something that could bite your ass legally (whatsapp)? Will you partially open source all of it minus whatsapp or what? If so say it instead of "ye ye I will open source it".
5. Do you really think anyone not stupid believes you can support so much shit and being native and 90 KB (version 0.27 coming tomorrow) when the past versions downloaded a GB?
You can't attack someone like that on HN, regardless of how bad you consider their software. We ban accounts that do this, so could you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and take the spirit of this site to heart when commenting here?
I don't want to ban you! But HN has the rules it does for a good reason: if people routinely break them, other users will do even worse. That way leads to the destruction of the site.
Think of it as an optimization problem. Even if all your points are correct, posting like you did above is to choose a local optimum (maximum sharpness for your points) over the global optimum (having an interesting community based on curiosity). That's a bad solution, especially since it's easy to make your substantive points in a civil way.
After checking out the guy and his project, it seems like he's really truly passionate about making minimal, fast software. I love it: I do a similar thing myself (I made the smallest, fastest CSS framework.) I can tell it in his comments and the effort he's put into this. It's a totally unique project, and as far as I can google, it's the only one of its kind. In a world of massive, bloated apps that eat gigs of RAM for breakfast it's a refreshing change.
The audience for something this minimal is fairly niche, and HN probably has the densest concentration of people for it. He's been mentioning it not very often, and only when it's relevant, which seems fair to me.
He's also clearly a very talented developer and put a ton of work into it. I have a feeling he'd like to make some money off it. I've been in a similar position myself, years ago: not sure whether to open-source or not because of the perpetual doubt in the back of your mind. I don't blame him: he's getting $11/month off Patreon.
The past versions thing doesn't matter IMO - after checking the Github, he says they don't work anymore. And the previous versions downloaded _half_ a gigabyte, apparently now it only downloads a few megabytes. Personally, the biggest thing that concerns me is the source: I'd have to see the source before I used it for anything.
Alex, if you'd like to talk about the world of FOSS, fast, minimal software, open-sourcing, and how to make money, feel free to send me an email - it's in my profile :)
As far as I can tell from the issues, previous versions of his software loaded the chat service in question's website in a browser, and then either applied a custom stylesheet to the webpage or attempted to extract portions of the HTML content for display.
eul.im literally never was minimal. He can keep saying it's minimal software, but until he produces something that both consistently works and doesn't consume orders of magnitude more storage than claimed, his words mean nothing. Again, current, literal reality is an issues page documenting myriad problems from crashes, blank screens, mangled displays, absence of advertised features, and claims of updated versions that still have not arrived.
Look, it's an issues page, and it's one-man free software. He's a few days late with the update for a free piece of software, so what? The dude's earning $11 a month on Patreon. Give him a damn break.
Not to be grumpy to you, but I'd like to defend him. He's got an extremely noble goal. Those that "get it" really get it, and those that don't don't. I'm fed up with using several different shitty closed source apps that take up gigs of ram at a time, and I've tried to write my own version of what he's done, and I've failed at it. It's incredibly hard. Particularly because the companies are locked in a neverending cat and mouse trying to stop apps like this.
Also, based on everything I've seen off of RAM/CPU usage while running there's absolutely no way he's using an embedded webpage. I'd be happy to be corrected here though.
I am quite familiar with one person free software projects. I use quite a few, and have released one myself. The variety and severity of problems in eul.im over such a short period of time is aberrant.
He claimed Discord support since 15/09/2017 - two months later, Discord support still wasn't available. He's been claiming since 28/09/2017 that he'd submit his app to Homebrew. As of four hours ago, he never said a peep to his mailing list about progress on the new version.
The app definitely used an embedded browser for authentication. That isn't speculation. He says the new version is rewritten to be a native app, as oppposed to what it was before. My assertion that the app used the browser for displaying content is speculation, but it is consistent with both the previous known behavior and the app's dysfunctions. The cool thing about software is that you can just examine the software to see what it does; too bad none of us will ever definitively know what his software did since he is deliberately hiding the previous versions from new eyes.
His history at best demonstrates incompetence. If the thing he is trying to do indeed is hard, than he is incompetent at doing a hard thing. One's reach exceeding his grasp is fine and necessary for personal growth - but in that case, do not lie and say you are delivering something you cannot deliver. If you are learning, say as much. Perhaps ask for help, perhaps keep previous attempts public so they can be analyzed by people trying something similar and by those with more experience. Perhaps upload your source code for the same reason. Do not put download links on your homepage that launch a popup saying there is no download.
Additionally, he's registered eul.im as a private company.
The registration info is trivially available by searching the company #(11072989) on his website. He is a Netherlands resident who registered eul.im as a one person UK software company. At least 10,000 other companies use the same postal address as eul.im. The software in question, as everyone agrees, has no revenue model, and isn't even currently available for download. [text on website reads "Download v0.27 (out on Feb 17, for real, no more delays)"]. This precisely fits the pattern of a shell corporation.
I did this to get the code signing certificate primarily. For some reason it's really hard to get a personal certificate, there's a lot of bureaucracy, and the notaries I talked to said they couldn't help me verify the documents.
I registered it online in the UK because it literally took 6 minutes. I'll register it in the Netherlands later.
It wasn't available for download because it wasn't ready :) Now there's a working download link.
>I can't download past versions and there's no current version to download till tomorrow. Why...
Because it wasn't ready yet.
> Will you partially open source all of it minus whatsapp or what?
Yes, that's an option.
> Do you really think anyone not stupid believes you can support so much shit and being native and 90 KB (version 0.27 coming tomorrow) when the past versions downloaded a GB?
The past version downloaded a browser (150-400 MB depending on your OS) for authentication, which was really silly. Now it doesn't.
And yes, it actually is a 90 KB app :) Of course it will grow as more features are added, but it will never be more than 1 MB.
Tweeten (a Tweetdeck clone) is my preferred one, but other people like Tweetbot, and Twitteriffic just kickstarted a new Mac app that people seem to like too.
(typing that sentence out made me realize just how ridiculous Twitter app names really are :-) )
I'm slightly curious what this means about the condition of Twitter as a business if an organization of their size doesn't want to spend the time/resources on maintaining this.
I would guess that the kinds of people who 1. use Macs and 2. decide to download the app are probably among some of Twitter's more engaged and higher-income users.
Ads are there to convert (sell stuff). Low income users buy less stuff. Also less expensive stuff. Ads catering to high income users tend to budget more for ads because they can be more lax with cost per user acquisition - their product has the margin to support it. All this leads to more income for twitter.
I've been using TweetDeck on Mac until it started crashing I guess after High Sierra update. Scrolling also works in somewhat weird way compared to other apps. The Twitter web app is a mess, it displays lots of tweets liked by others that usually is just clickbaity noise, not something I want to see in my feed even though cat pictures can be funny indeed.
Also notifications used to show actually relevant notifications but nowadays it just displays retweets and tweets liked by others just like in my main feed and I haven't found a way to disable that.
I thought they killed the TweetDeck app for all platforms. Mac must have survived the cut. You can still use it on the web, but I don't know how it compares to the apps.
Twitterrific is on sale right now in the Mac App Store for eight bucks. Both it and Tweetbot are great native Mac Twitter apps and are so much better than the web interface.
Maybe this is a good thing. My current Mac app will remain a "pure" Twitter app and I won't have to worry about it updating to include promotions, suggested tweets, and needless features (unless "stop supporting" means they're shutting off the API).
"TweetBot" has been the canonical "good" Mac Twitter client for a while now. But there are strict limits on the number of clients Twitter allow for third party companies, which is why it's so expensive - so that they do not hit that limit.
I see from all the other responses too that this is the case. I thought if it was available to their own web client, another local client could just effectively scrape that data.
The commentary on this is off base - maybe twitter is pulling people off this project to put them on fake accounts / nazis? Certainly maintaining a mac app doesn't help there.
Better battery life? Lower memory usage? Integration with the platform conventions?
I don’t want to use Twitter in a tab.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Websites, wrapped web views, react native, et al solve a developer’s problem. They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse, the only question is how much worse. How much better are you forcing me to pay? How much cognitive tax am I paying?
> They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse
I mean, webapps obviously have a positive value for you over the alternative of not using the service—otherwise you would be doing exactly that (and maybe using a competitor's service.)
At least personally, I appreciate first-class web-app versions of apps (with or without wrappers), since I use a not-very-popular OS and web-apps are basically the only way any company is ever going to give me a version of their software I can use.
That's a pretty broad statement. As a user, I hate installing apps. They take up disk space, and then I need to remember to remove them if I am not using it.
Also as a user, I am not sure how much additional security holes are created by installing a third-party binary. With a webapp, there is only a single source of security issues (browser).
A better UI. As every native app does. Yes, in principle web apps can do more, from drag & drop to .. stuff. But in practice they never do, they never go the extra mile but instead just building for the lowest common denominator.
Also the dock spot is important for my method of using windowing. The browser is for websites. I wouldn't want to mix it. I could banish twitter.com to a wrapper window with Fluid, but it's still just a crappy web app. I use Tweetbot instead. And before that Tweetie for Mac. Which was killed today. Fingers crossed that the API survives.
One of the greatest things about the Twitter native apps were that the guy who originally wrote them (Loren Brichter, who Twitter acqui-hired) literally invented the Pull-to-refresh gesture that is used everywhere nowadays.
Before Twitter killed native clients by restricting their acccess tokens, they were an amazing place for people to try out new UI ideas - a really simple concept (one text area and a scrolling list) but a huge explosion of ways of presenting and interacting with it. Then twitter bought Tweetie and Twetdeck and restricted what the 3rd party clients could do and it all just died.
It used to be much nicer to use, back when Twitter acquired it. (It was called Tweetie then.) The notifications were better, the mechanics of doing things like following conversations or refreshing a conversation were simpler, filtering options were better, etc.
And I don't think it had a prominent spot in the dock... IIRC its icon was mainly in the menu bar.
It's been a while since I used tweetie or twitter, though, for very much at all. I'm really sorry to see it go away more because it used to be a nice UI playground for a talented developer than because of any recent experience with it.
Its much easier to manage multiple accounts. I think on the website you can only be logged in as one account at a time. The twitter app has a vertical 'tab' for each account.
For me at least the killer feature in the twitter app is the global hotkey I can press to hide/show it: when I have 5 seconds of downtime I can press the hotkey, read three tweets, and then send it away. Great for filling short pauses while other things load or I'm waiting for a response from someone.
Fortunately Tweetbot has that same feature now, so I've switched to it.
Chrome + (Windows / Mac / Ubuntu) should let users dock any "Web App". That would enable new possibilities. No one would ever write an app specifically for mac / windows.
> No one would ever write an app specifically for mac / windows
And then we'd all have lowest-common denominator crap. Imagine if Final Cut Pro were a web app. I much, much prefer Apple Mail to some Gmail webpage for instance. I also like apps to be able to actually take advantage of my hardware. Web browsers ought not be treated like de facto operating systems.
Web apps aren't the panacea they're being promoted as.
The broader ecosystem doesn't seem to think so. All kinds of software like Atom, VSCode, the desktop Slack client, Discord, etc are all just Electron or React apps wrapped in native installers and launchers.
I think this is a case of everything looking like a nail if all you have is a hammer.
A lot of programmers these days have been brought up on JS and web technologies so they literally do not see any other solutions, regardless of how much better they may be.
What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group.
This is really a failing of our desktop window managers, not of web browsers: we need to separate the semantic concepts of "process" and "application", such that one process can be responsible for driving several applications, and choosing to "quit" an application can just result in an IPC message being sent to the process telling it that the user wants that window-group-context gone, rather than telling the window manager to go terminate the entire process.
(Such a feature would also greatly help with things like managing "non-rooted" Remote Desktop or X11 or virtual-machine windows. Right now, some of these use a workaround of generating a stub binary to register each foreign application for the local DWM's sake. But it's a leaky abstraction: Alt+Tab/Cmd+Tab to the proxy "application", and the RDP client/X server/VM "app" gets focus instead. If window-groups—with metadata for the name and icon of the "application" they represent—were something a process could publish to a DWM, rather than something the DWM tried to determine heuristically about an application process, all of these problems would go away. And, even without offering this up for webapps to use, browsers would benefit from this change: Chrome's "profiles" are exactly separate "application" window-groups in the same sense as apps under an X server or VM process.)
> What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group.
Works perfectly on windows. Let's say I pin Gmail as an app on the taskbar. When I open Gmail using that button, it remains attached to that taskbar button, which is an icon of Gmail for convenience. In fact it's not obvious to figure out that it's running on Chrome.
