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.
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.