Comment by Torwald

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Comment by Torwald

Good work! I do like that the tools are task centric and that means I don"t have to handle all sorts of things, I just quickly learn the three to four tools that I really need (as a person working in the real world). #pareto

Now, privacy, I love it! That "normal people" just store stuff in the cloud "it's on my phone", yeah ok, is one thing. It's another topic…

But since Gmail came out and was all the rage in nerd circles, I am wondering why the people who understand the tech the most, are so eager to hand over their data to Big Tech and some other very questionable entities.

Here's the thing in terms of money.

If your app does put my data into the cloud, I am not going to use it. At all. Ever.

If your app blesses me with a beautifully designed native GUI (or UI), instead of presenting itself in Electron slop to me, then I am already almost sold. Literally. I start to consider forking over some cash to you, dear developer of that beautifully designed, privacy respecting app.

I do use my browser to browse the web. I am not interested in a "secondary OS architecture" where I have to play sys admin for a range of "apps" aka plugins. Neither Chrome plugins (I don't use Chromium based stuff.) nor Wordpress plugins, nor Emacs "modes" are going to replace well done native programs.

You don't care enough about your project to provide a native program? Tells me, I shouldn't care either. Good buy.

For a high school student who survives on an allowance, paying $39 for an app may be a bit much, but not for an adult with an income.

Curation. A good maintained app store does all the "sys admin" stuff for me. No viruses, no weird installation procedures and so on.

This is why that works. Hassle-free. Locally-run, native app, means beauty and privacy.

I would pay for that. Happily. In fact, I have done so many times. The success of a plethora of developers with paid-for apps in the stores proves I am not the only one.

And, btw, this is the distribution/commerce model that RMS always favoured. I quote RMS:

> Since “free” refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software. In fact, the freedom to sell copies is crucial: collections of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the community, and selling them is an important way to raise funds for free software development. Therefore, a program that people are not free to include on these collections is not free software.

This is basically the app-store model.

And I would pay, for the above stated reasons and I would be inclined to gulp an even higher price if the package has the "OSS inside" sticker on it. For personal reasons, right?

Then there is one last thing. I don't want to have to create an account somewhere just to test-drive your app. Or to use it fully, later on.

Privacy means, I don't have to be online in order to use the software. The end.

Replies Torwald · 2026-01-19
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    About YAVCHN

    YAVCHN is a reader for Hacker News and Lobsters, with articles and discussions in separate windows or Classic pages.

    Created by Paul Parks and built with PUDL.

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    The whole arrangement lives in the address, so a bookmark or a shared link brings it back, and Back undoes the last change. Moving between Hacker News, Lobsters, their lists, Pinned and Find changes only the list, and leaves the windows open.

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    The pin at the start of a row keeps the story in Pinned, and the cross at its end hides it. Pinned can be narrowed by words in the title, site or author, by source, and to the stories you haven't opened yet, and ordered by when you pinned them, by points or by comments; the filters are part of the address, so a filtered view can be bookmarked. Scroll past the end of the list to load more. Domain filters, in the View menu, hide every story from a site.

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    The Applets menu in the menu bar holds three tools, each a window of its own. Replies to me takes your Hacker News user name and lists the replies to your last thirty comments and stories, checking again every three minutes while it is open, and marking what is new since you last marked them read. Look up a user opens a profile on Hacker News or Lobsters, with their submissions and recent comments, as a commenter's name in any discussion does; the bar at the top of a profile looks up someone else in the same window, and Back returns to the one before. Who is hiring? filters the posts of HN's monthly hiring threads by the words you type.

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