Serious question, not trying to be a jerk. Why do people keep making these? Because they’re fun? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these gain traction.
As someone who has been working on one for nearly 3 years, it is indeed a lot of fun to make. I also learn a lot from doing it and I enjoy making the app as I use it for my personal website. It's my side/passion project and I hope to get to work on it for a long time to come.
They clearly have talent, I don't understand why they don't make products like Draw.IO or at least something more meaningful and original than a 2000's era desktop environment.
>> This is what happens when the Wozniak's of the World
Yes, surely this is proof that every talented coder is only useful when serving a preening egomaniac. I mean, who else is gonna handle all the hard work of getting publicity and taking credit for things?
> This is what happens when the Wozniak's of the World don't have a Steve to guide them. They do what they want without a clear vision to practicality.
If their goal includes "practicality", then sure, maybe this indicates that they need a guiding hand.
But, as far as I can tell with all these types of projects, the goal isn't practicality, so you cannot tell whether or not they need a guiding hand.
As far as I can tell, these projects all appear to have made progress towards their goal.
In summary, what you think their goal is, is not what their goal is.
This is going to be a bit unrelated to what you said, but I recommend looking into Mermaid diagrams in your MD files as a replacement for draw.io. It saved us a bunch of time and has given us documentation diagrams that developers actually want to update because they don’t have to spend 9 years aligning lines.
I think you are right you need a strategy if aiming for success, riding a wave or what you predict to be a future wave. But now millions of people are open sourcing so there is a fuck load of noise. To the point that I would say you don’t pay a company selling commercial software for the software ad much as you pay to not need to choose between a million free options with scant or bad sales copy and have some proof of customer success.
I forked one of these websites, and added more apps to it (developer included all of the app icons in Yaru, so this was an rather easy task). Personally, I wouldn't want to make my own, for a number of reasons.
> As a JS dev currently looking for a job, can you elaborate on this comment?
You can build a new framework and use that as your portfolio.
JS apps like these can be quickly tried in the browser.
That's not true of a new Go/Rust/Java library.
It's kind of true because the WASM GC proposal still isn't finished, so Rust and C++ are the only reasonable options, and also there's no native support for calling web platform APIs yet, so there's a lot of overhead for doing web stuff and you have to use a ton of JavaScript glue code (there are tools to help, but still...).
JavaScript / Typescript will probably always have a size advantage over WASM anyway because they don't have to ship any runtimes or standard library code. E.g. formatting a string or running a regex in JS is just a few bytes but in Rust you have to ship a whole string formatting/regex library.
