That’s fantastic news! For those not in the loop Element is just rebranded Riot.im. We really need an open protocol for chat communication to become a standard. The fact that all the popular chat platforms are proprietary is a travesty.
It’s especially painful nowadays where a lot of chat apps are implemented using Electron making them rather hefty in terms of resource usage. Having to run both Slack and Discord for example is pretty taxing. This problem wouldn’t exist using open protocols.
The non-electron desktop apps for matrix currently are pretty dissapointing… but that can always improve. Nheko was the only one that I tried for a while that actually had working encryption, which is standard now… none of the other clients even support encryption.
The mobile clients are really good tho, RiotX is probably going to get re-branded as element too, and its great.
Electron will also continue to improve a going forward I imagine. There isn’t any fundamental reason why it needs to be slow or bloated. One very positive aspect of Electron is in helping finally make Linux desktop a first class citizen. A lot of apps just wouldn’t exist on Linux without it. Being able to run stuff like Slack and Discord really helps since a lot of people are stuck having to use these apps. So, despite the issues I still support Electron approach overall.
Also, don’t know if you’ve seen but stuff like Tauri looks really interesting as well. It’s a tiny footprint compared to Electron and uses Rust as the backend.
Whoa never heard of Tauri, that looks pretty interesting. I’d also love to see more iced or relm apps, those are cross-platform rust GUI toolkits that could easily have all kinds of apps made for them.
That is pretty nifty. I imagine web stack has a lot of appeal because a lot of people are already familiar with it, and you get a web UI for the app for free using it. It is nice to see more native toolkits being developed though.
Electron still has the most each since you can use it for a web UI as well as mobile. I also suspect more people are familiar with web tech in general, and in my experience it tends to be easier to work with. The workflow can be quite nice as well. I find hotloading to be especially nice when working on UIs since you can get the app in a particular state and tweak it without having to rebuild the state each time. This talk is a good example.
Fluffychat has working encryption too! It works on desktop and mobile with the desktop app being a snap. I think encryption was just made standard in March? So some apps and the SDKs they rely on have to catch up.
The bridges feature of Matrix servers is something interesting regarding that problem.
I think it’s a wise move as it integrates in everyone’s life and lessens that sensation of fighting against the system.
(I’m thinking about how I used Signal, where I have <10 contacts, hoping that it would replace WhatsApp. I can’t see that happening, everyone will use what they prefer.)
That’s fantastic news! For those not in the loop Element is just rebranded Riot.im. We really need an open protocol for chat communication to become a standard. The fact that all the popular chat platforms are proprietary is a travesty.
It’s especially painful nowadays where a lot of chat apps are implemented using Electron making them rather hefty in terms of resource usage. Having to run both Slack and Discord for example is pretty taxing. This problem wouldn’t exist using open protocols.
The non-electron desktop apps for matrix currently are pretty dissapointing… but that can always improve. Nheko was the only one that I tried for a while that actually had working encryption, which is standard now… none of the other clients even support encryption.
The mobile clients are really good tho, RiotX is probably going to get re-branded as element too, and its great.
Electron will also continue to improve a going forward I imagine. There isn’t any fundamental reason why it needs to be slow or bloated. One very positive aspect of Electron is in helping finally make Linux desktop a first class citizen. A lot of apps just wouldn’t exist on Linux without it. Being able to run stuff like Slack and Discord really helps since a lot of people are stuck having to use these apps. So, despite the issues I still support Electron approach overall.
Also, don’t know if you’ve seen but stuff like Tauri looks really interesting as well. It’s a tiny footprint compared to Electron and uses Rust as the backend.
And yeah, RiotX is excellent!
Whoa never heard of Tauri, that looks pretty interesting. I’d also love to see more iced or relm apps, those are cross-platform rust GUI toolkits that could easily have all kinds of apps made for them.
That is pretty nifty. I imagine web stack has a lot of appeal because a lot of people are already familiar with it, and you get a web UI for the app for free using it. It is nice to see more native toolkits being developed though.
I wonder why GTK+/Qt can’t do the same. Both of them are very capable cross-platform frameworks that support several languages.
Electron still has the most each since you can use it for a web UI as well as mobile. I also suspect more people are familiar with web tech in general, and in my experience it tends to be easier to work with. The workflow can be quite nice as well. I find hotloading to be especially nice when working on UIs since you can get the app in a particular state and tweak it without having to rebuild the state each time. This talk is a good example.
Electron will be replaced by PWA in my opinion. Electron was always a hack.
Yeah PWA is likely the way most apps are gonna end up being built going forward.
Fluffychat has working encryption too! It works on desktop and mobile with the desktop app being a snap. I think encryption was just made standard in March? So some apps and the SDKs they rely on have to catch up.
First, nice Flutter app.
Second, nice matrix app.
The bridges feature of Matrix servers is something interesting regarding that problem. I think it’s a wise move as it integrates in everyone’s life and lessens that sensation of fighting against the system.
(I’m thinking about how I used Signal, where I have <10 contacts, hoping that it would replace WhatsApp. I can’t see that happening, everyone will use what they prefer.)
Yeah, that looks very promising. It’s really great to see open source platforms starting to mature.