Like I wrote in another response, we are due for a landing page revamp, and we'll be sure to make a "nothing but the facts" hero for people like yourself who are concerned that their time is being wasted.
It's not for "people like me," it's for everyone. In terms of volume of traffic you're going to get, no one else cares about this stuff.
Here's an example of one of my projects where I do just that: https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/ Literally! I tell people what my team has built. I show them a screenshot. I then provide API examples. Mine could be better if I provided screenshots per API example, too. Everyone can improve.
Your audience is technical, they don't want a non-technical pitch. Tell me it's faster than Electron, show me RAM usage comparisons, etc.
We actually had this at an earlier stage during the alpha, but got so caught up in the alpha that we just plain forgot to put the apps for mac, win and linux back up there. We'll try to get that done this weekend. We have a full "API Explorer" app that we built...
You're going to do great. Just steer the ship back in the direction of the elevator pitch experience. After that 20-30 second experience, if people are interested in more (provide Getting Started at the end of all of that, not the beginning,) they will click on it and want to learn more about what you have to offer.
Avoid putting things in people's face before they've gotten to know you. You're not trying to be a food blog throwing pop-ups in people's faces about how they need to subscribe to your newsletter. You're trying to be a competitor to Electron.
Here's what their website tells me what they do:
> Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
Ah! OK. I'm interested. And see how specific they are? Don't be vague. Don't say "web front-end," what do you mean? React? They then show me screenshots! Of what big companies built!
Then. They provide a Getting Started section. Not great, could be better. I want to see how it's used. But this is the bar. Be better than that bar.
Edit: Even Electron's site provides Getting Started at the end.
Having the getting started button at the end is a good idea I think, we'll look into that.
We say "web frontend" because that's as descriptive as we can be really. We support any web framework that runs in a browser. As for screenshots of big companies' apps, we don't have any major companies that have adopted Tauri yet, as we just came out of alpha, but we will add a section like that as soon as we can.
It's difficult for us to demonstrate how Tauri is used in short snippets that could fit at the beginning of the Getting Started section. Electron's site doesn't have any code snippets either, just snippets for installing via npm and some example apps.
I understand the difficulties of competing with incumbents because size and usage are not your strong points yet, sort of. You all have over 16k stars on GitHub as a proxy for interest! My team still has under 1k.
It also doesn't help that we chose a language that isn't popular. But you all need to think about how decision making like that massively effects adoption.
You won't learn these lessons quickly, they take years, so ignore people who say you need to experiment and research what works. The biggest issues you'll face is that no one will tell you what's wrong unless you're faced with it in threads like this on HN or other places where you'll meet consumers.
The worst part of it is, these are the obnoxious glaring details. There might be massive decisions you make that consumers can't pinpoint for you. Thought-leaders don't often describe those details because of survivorship bias.
What I can see this team failing at, too, is that you need an anchor client. You're spending all this time on BS that doesn't mean anything at all.
Specifically, at GitHub, they already had users using Atom, which made for a great way to advertise Electron. It was Atom!
You need to essentially find whales (Read: engineering leaders at businesses) and make the product good enough for one of them to say, yeah I'll use this over Electron, and if they're an attractive user, pump them on your front page. Find a way to make a deal with them so that you can funnel developers to their hiring channels.
The engine is multiplayer first because you don't have to write any special code to implement it. When you start a game, if you set maxplayers to something beyond 1, it's multiplayer automatically.
When you create entities in the engine, all you have to do is specify what fields you want networked, and the game engine automatically serializes deltas for you on that field as they change.
It takes care of more advanced field networking like prediction as well.
You focus on making things, not making them networkable. If you want that, you just say it's networked. That's it.
Maybe you should put that pitch up there on the starting page, because personally I find it too bland. The screenshot doesn't tell me anything, might as well not put it up there.
If you scroll down to the roadmap, you can see that system trays are supported. We don't yet support native context menus, but that would be a relatively simple addition. Our GitHub readme has a table comparing Electron's and Tauri's features, do you think it would be useful to include that on the website landing page?
I think if time on page and average session metrics suggested that's what people wanted, that's what we would see. It's like complaining about how the news reports on inane stuff.
Sounds like a case of bad metrics. Time on page when your goal is to get people to use your software/framework isn't meaningful. In fact, I suspect better communication leads to shorter times.
Similar idea with news. The objectives of profit and conveying meaningful information aren't necessarily aligned.
Disregarding the subjectivity of 'meaningful,' the advice 'know your target audience' is good from both a product design and marketing presentation stand point.
I think that for both examples, having people's attention is a precursor to doing anything else. That's just my intuition though.
Maybe it is possible to have a landing page that people leave much more quickly but that is more successful. Maybe it is possible to keep your audience informed without them watching for very long.
You are assuming they have done analysis and A/B testing. More likely they simply copied the approach of consumer products, without thinking too deeply about the fact that developers are their only users.
It's not for "people like me," it's for everyone. In terms of volume of traffic you're going to get, no one else cares about this stuff.
Here's an example of one of my projects where I do just that: https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/ Literally! I tell people what my team has built. I show them a screenshot. I then provide API examples. Mine could be better if I provided screenshots per API example, too. Everyone can improve.
Your audience is technical, they don't want a non-technical pitch. Tell me it's faster than Electron, show me RAM usage comparisons, etc.