Great piece of software and proud to advocate for its use on macOS to anyone willing to listen.
- Raycast has a nice UI that can expand to work well with extensions
- Flow is faster to use. With Raycast you often need to enter an extension to finish your action. To launch a scrip on Flow I just type "r [shortcut] -> enter" while Raycast is "quicklinks -> enter -> [shortcut] -> enter
- Performance-wise, Raycast was often eating my RAM, but a dev mentioned it's expected in the beta, they'll fix it for the launch. Otherwise, both feel snappy
- Both seem to have enough community support and extensions
- I never really tried the AI features, I don't know if it's the right place for me to augment my workflow w/ it
Curious about the experience of others with these tools or similar ones
anaisbetts•16m ago
Developers please, when you do this, you are telling your audience, the people you want to pay you money for your work, "Yeah, we think you suck, but here's some thing we finally got around to porting over" - why would you do that?
dustbunny•8m ago
And they are right.
The enshittification of windows is by far the most egregious example in modern software.
Windows is disgusting. The start menu is disgusting. The bloat, slowness, lack of design cohesion and flakiness has real consequences.
Its not "you suck" it's "windows used to be better" and to me it seems objectively true that it used to be better
p_ing•3m ago
Windows used to BSOD when the graphics stack crashed.
Used to come without a built-in firewall exposing all sorts of vulnerabilities to the public Internet.
Used to not isolate critical kernel components to 3rd party software.
(And Windows has always had a hodge-poge of UI designs dating back to NT4/Win95 which contained Win3.x design elements)
The list can go on about how it most certainly, objectively, was not "better".
vintagedave•5m ago
I think people who do this think that people who use Windows perceive that the Mac experience is smoother, and may have some sort of Mac envy.
The end of the video gives this away: it's the Think Different font. It's a direct callback to the _idea_ of Apple vs Microsoft, not the reality today of Apple vs Microsoft.
I know many devs who use Windows exclusively, but they are in two camps:
a) Super old-school: still maintaining Windows desktop apps; that's what their career has been and there's no need for anything else.
b) WSL-based, VSCode-using devs who are one step away from just using Linux. These are the folk who fifteen years ago would have been using what was then still OSX. But these folk don't use Windows as Windows: they use it as a semi-Unix.
JosephRedfern•3m ago
The whole purpose of Raycast is to improve productivity and UX, be that under macOS or Windows. It'd be a pretty shitty launch announcement if the blog post didn't mention the problem that they're trying to solve.