If you don't want to give full access to all your data, check out https://starthq.com. We do federated search from the client via an extension. There's also an API which lets you add support for any service you want: https://starthq.com/developers
We haven't been actively working on it for a while, so have been considering open sourcing it. If anyone is interested in helping out with that or has ideas as to how to monetize this, drop me a line (hello@starthq.com).
Have you also considered the Pillar Project's approach? They too struggled for funding, but I rather like the connection among blockchain technology, ICO funding, and personal data tools. I think the inversion of control that these efforts are seeking is what society needs in order to have a more healthy relationship with companies (and governments).
This would be such a nice app if it was local-only. Like, there's no reason for it not to be...
You could have the index created locally or even just do remote calls for search to the respective API's. There's really no reason for this to be cloud-based. Maybe access token synchronization, but in this case, I think setting up all accounts on each device I have once... wouldn't be much of a trouble compared to giving them access to all my storage everywhere.
You know, it's creepy for a single person too though. I know you're storing only metadata to build an index, but that is still a lot and I think for most it causes a big feeling of unease.
In my opinion your service would be great if it were fully-local. This would also open up the path to full-text search for documents, without being creepy. I'm not expecting you to do that for free of course, I mean as a paid product. (Haven't dug into your current pricing details)
That said, the need for something like this almost outweighs the cost. But I so agree w/ what you're saying. That was my first thought—uh—so. much. access.
Before I sign up, I'd want to know what's safe, where, and why.
Hey there, happy to answer any questions you might have.
Diamond's working to make permissions more granular and transparent with each release. Some quick points:
* we don't store the files themselves, only the metadata the service provides (e.g. file names, collaborators, paths)
* we don't store service passwords (authentication is handed back to the service itself
* we do on-prem installs for corporate customers and we'd consider a version of it for pro as well.
We take our first impressions on security and privacy very seriously. Happy to take some feedback on how we can improve trust.
Hi! Great reply - this is how you earn early adopters trust. At the potential cost of giving away your "secret sauce", I'd highly recommend being as transparent as possible about what you do and what you don't do to people's data. There's a huge need for your service, but as most of the comments here point out - be f'n careful.
> We take our first impressions on security and privacy very seriously.
This statement is unforutnately, NOT how you earn people's trust. Presumably your early adopters are technically inclined. Guess what, they don't care if you say "we take it seriously", they want you to show why you take it seriously. Furthermore, any large financial institution (for example) is going to say the same thing. Sure your sales guy says "we take it seriously", but you're not going to win any deals if you don't pass their security audit.
I'm also to worried about giving full access to my emails but I don't think that makes me a scared person. I think wrorrying here is perfectly fine and understandable.
isn't this an app like Rambox which is effectively a glorified web browser? That one at least only opens the web interfaces of the various chat and email applications out there right now, it doesn't store (or claims not to) any credentials itself. Doesn't need to either. I mean it'd have to implement authentication for all those services, which is hard to scale.
I think we're different from Rambox in the sense that we're not trying to emulate the in-service experience for many services in our own our app. Instead, the idea is create an access point to take you to the file, email or insight with less effort. As for authentication, that's handed off to the service a user is trying to authenticate (e.g. Google Accounts).
Ctrl+Space is a really unfortunate keyboard shortcut, it's an extremely common shortcut to trigger auto-complete in IDEs and some editors. I downloaded the app to try it out and can't find any way to rebind it, and I don't intend on undoing years of muscle memory in my IDEs…
Never knew I needed that until it appeared on the HN front page.
On a more serious note, I can totally see the value this adds. Everything is so fragmented these days. Nice. Franz did something similar for chat, but never really took off, I'm afraid. Hopefully, those guys will fare better.
The problem with Franz is it's literally just a browser running each chat service in its own tab.
For anyone who's known and used well-integrated multi-protocol IMs like Pidgin or Trillian (or heck, any of the browser-based ones from the past), it's incredibly sad how far we've fallen.
Especially since my Trillian account is now ONLY for Trillian and a single client who uses XMPP for their chat.
Google Chat is gone, AIM is gone, Facebook Chat is gone. No one uses ICQ anymore, and even if they did, they are probably on my facebook or hangouts anyway. Its disappointing how every chat service went to a closed protocol model.
Maybe we need a cloud-cloud. One place to put all our files. The unifying interface would take care of uploading/downloading files to/from the individual clouds.
Would be nice if all clouds supported a common communication protocol. I for one would like to mount cloud storages as network drives in macOS without third-party apps (aka badly working hacks). One can dream…
Franz looks like it was an abandoned project; its spiritual successor seems to be Rambox, which supports a lot more services atm. See http://rambox.pro/
For money, and whatever else, it seems. [1] It's a shame because it works well. I asked in their Slack channel if there would be a way to use Franz 5 without that, and was told no. The code has been open-sourced [2], so perhaps someone could fork it.
Really like the unified search concept: one suggestion would be to add a page with a comprehensive list of the data sources that they support. Right now besides the repeated "Ai" tiles in the background, a disparate collection of logos and the sentence "Google Drive, Gmail, Dropbox, Outlook, and more" there isn't ANY information about what is supported.
We actually just launched the latest version of something similar. However Gurn doesn't require you to setup integrations with all your cloud services, we're based around the URL - https://www.gurn.io/
I've been using Gurn (yeah I know it's an terrible name!) for over a year. I was initially pretty skeptical but it's totally won me over.
It is one of those tools that makes your everyday job way easier. I can type 'go instances' and boom I'm straight where I want to be in the AWS Console.
I can't imagine being without it now. It's such a great productivity tool. If they ever shutdown I will build a shoddy version just for myself, seriously.
I worked at a company building something similar. I do think this kinda product is a bit niche. Certainly when we tried to roll something out similar it was a hard sell as most companies are trying to standardise on one type of cloud storage solution.
That being said they do support searching across slack, email and other things. That was something we didn't support and I think that makes this product much more appealing.
Anyone know if this supports Nextcloud/WebDav? I can't seem to be able to tell from the website. That and a nice Linux version and I would use this in a heartbeat considering how all over the place things are these days.
Will there come a time when Electron apps are considered native? I'm not being facetious here, just posing the question that if — say — the horrendous performance issues of Electron were ironed-out, or perhaps a similar standard that isn't such a mess, would you consider it less fake?
