I love how people continue to experiment in browserland. Min has some cool stuff going:

Tabs in Min take up less space, giving you more room to browse the web. Pages you haven’t looked at in a while fade out, letting you see what’s important, and Focus Mode hides your other tabs to prevent you from getting distracted.

It also sports built-in ad blocking (table stakes for new browsers to compete?) and DDG integration in the search bar.

Min is built on Electron, so while it may be fast it possibly isn’t memory efficient. But what browser is, these days? It’s also worth noting that Min runs on an older version of Chromium, so it’s likely missing some security fixes. (More on that right here.)

Buttercup claims to be secure, simple, and free. That’s a powerful trio if it can deliver on its promises. It has a cross-platform desktop app (thanks in part to Electron), iOS and Android apps, and extensions for every major browser.

That’s a lot! Especially for an open source project created primarily by just two people. Could this steal marketshare from the big guns such as 1Password and LastPass?

Sometimes you’re watching YouTube or referencing some documentation while you code and you just want that particular window to stay in view no matter what else you’re up to. This does just that (and only that).

Pennywise allows you to open anything in a small floating window that always stays on top of the other applications all the time, allowing you to multitask with ease

This only works well by accident and was mostly a joke. The code quality is accordingly.

It may be a joke, but it’s one that’s chock full of nostalgia for the once-great operating system.

Kball and Feross talk with Shelley Vohr and Jeremy Apthorp about what Electron is, why to use it, and what comes next for the platform.

Ao is an unofficial, featureful, open source, community-driven, free Microsoft To-Do app, used by people in more than 120 countries.

This looks eerily similar to Tusk… (same author)

Tusk is an unofficial, featureful, open source, community-driven, free Evernote app used by people in more than 130 countries.

James Long is a prolific blogger and the author of several open source libraries including Prettier. He has recently started developing Actual, a budgeting app built in React and Electron. In this episode we talk about James’ approach to business, as well as take a peek behind the scenes at how he works with React.

Boasting a built-in package manager, smart/fast autocomplete, and component previewing, Reacto is an interesting option if you do React work all-day-every-day. Here’s the why:

There is absolutely no free software, all-included for React development. The idea is to create the right tool for everyone, to build ideas faster. This is a community project, using plain React code. Anyone can contribute and make it better. Anyone can suggest ideas and help everyone having the perfect tools in their hands. This is what Reacto aims to be: useful.

An exciting new project from Nathan Sobo and team:

an experimental Electron-based text editor informed by what we’ve learned in the four years since the launch of Atom … this project is a testbed for rapidly iterating on several radical ideas without risking the stability of Atom

Xray’s priorities are high performance, collaboration, extensibility, and web compatibility. Needless to say, we’ll be keeping our 👀 on this project over the coming months.

Written in JavaScript using HTML5 Canvas API, SQLite and built on Electron.

🎉 Flexible invoicing desktop app with beautiful and customizable templates.

If you send invoices on a somewhat-regularly basis, try this tool on for size. The output really does look nice. 😍

Zeke Sikelianos joined the show to talk about GitHub’s Electron project and the future of web folks making cross platform desktop apps. We talked about the web revolution around native vs web app, where Electron is heading, who’s using it, and how cool it is to enable folks like Guillermo Rauch to build HyperTerm.