Ten Years of Franz

https://meetfranz.com/blog/ten-years-of-franz

by tosh • 2 months ago

68 38 2 months ago

meetfranz.com

shawn_w• 2 months ago

Apparently not about the makers of Allegro Common Lisp¹ and assorted graph database tools.

1: https://franz.com/

bigbuppo• 2 months ago

I too was confused.

block_dagger• 2 months 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?

TylerE• 2 months 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.

e12e• 2 months 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.

smithcoin• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Good old times, same for me. Just ended up not bothering and deactivating any additional services - digital detox time ＼ ( ° o ° ) ／

hypfer6• 2 months 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.

fragmede3• 2 months 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?

hypfer6• 2 months 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.

croes• 2 months ago

Paying customers isn’t a good measure.

Some people paid for this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

anonzzzies• 2 months ago

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!

fithisux• 2 months ago

Exactly. I was tricked too.

cantalopes• 2 months ago

It's electron, everything electron will always have these performance issues unfortunately

Btw actual solution for you might be plain old Pidgin

Syzygies• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

per description it should've called AntiFranz then.

yellow_lead2• 2 months 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)

maccard• 2 months ago

Beeper is completely free, but the downside is it was acquired by Automattic

This is the cost of free.

Dylan16807• 2 months ago

Nah, it can happen to any company.

adlk4• 2 months ago

Matt actually made an offer all those years back to bring Franz under their roof ;)

adlk4• 2 months ago

Beeper is completely free

Not necessarily true but buried in their FAQ section https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-much-does-beeper-cost-to-use

yellow_lead2• 2 months ago

Wow that is expensive. I stand corrected

AbuAssar• 2 months 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!

adlk4• 2 months 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.

adlk4• 2 months ago

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.

drcongo• 2 months 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.

amelius• 2 months 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.

locao• 2 months ago

Such as Google Wave? I really wanted it to work.

nchmy• 2 months 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.

https://github.com/ferdium/ferdium-app

Ten Years of Franz

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