Great, another notepad app that requires an entire web browser and an internet connection to function.
We have had better cross-platform text editors for decades. Mousepad[1] was released 18 years ago and is still getting updates, and is only a megabyte in size.
Please don't dismiss other people's work like this. It poisons community and disincentivizes people from sharing in the future, making HN worse for all of us.
All: if your comment begins with a snarky "Great, another", you should probably rethink whether the entire post is suitable for this site.
p.s. I don't mean to pile on what dspillett already said and am sorry if it felt that way. I just need to say something because it's so important to the future of the community here. Especially when someone is personally sharing their own work.
This is a primarily tech oriented website. When someone posts a 2 years old cross-platform project that's arguably suboptimal from many technical perspectives, and the submitter explicitly asks for feedback and criticism, I think it is fair game to actually give feedback instead of hugboxing.
Certainly—but it is not hard to do that while also respecting the guidelines. Here is one thing that https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html says about comments on Show HNs:
When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is, but don't be gratuitously negative.
Making criticisms by starting out with "Great, another" is snarky and gratuitously negative. This is not a borderline call.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
If I make my own toaster as a side project, pointing out that there have been better toasters for decades is not meaningfully engaging with that work.
Better might be to inquire: what is it about the toasters that have existed for decades that wasn't satisfying you? And then I might say "well, I wanted it to have a progress bar". And you might say "Mousetoaster was released 18 years ago and more or less already had that," and then we could have an interesting conversation about it.
That's the sort of interaction we want. It still offers lots of ways to talk about what's missing from a project, or the fact that it won't work on Firefox.
Great. Another person complaining about something they can just choose not to use, criticising a pet project as if it is intended to be something that will change the world.
> This PWA will also never work on Firefox.
True. But as much as I like Firefox, that doesn't seem to me to be NotepadJs's doing.
> Great. Another person complaining about something they can just choose not to use, criticising a pet project as if it is intended to be something that will change the world.
That's fair. I am just upset with a general shift away from simple, accessible cross-platform GUI libraries to complicated web apps.
Literally any GUI toolkit has a textbox widget. You could make a cross-platform qt text editor in 100~ lines of Python.
> as much as I like Firefox, that doesn't seem to me to be NotepadJs's doing.
Well NotepadJS chose to create a PWA that can only be used in Chrome and Opera. Though like you said, it's just a pet project.
> Well NotepadJS chose to create a PWA that can only be used in Chrome and Opera.
Is there another way that I'm unaware of to conveniently edit arbitrary local files in a browser that has wider support (or anything upcoming that doesn't have much support yet)?
We have had better cross-platform text editors for decades. Mousepad[1] was released 18 years ago and is still getting updates, and is only a megabyte in size.
This PWA will also never work on Firefox.[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousepad_(software) [2]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s...