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Rambox

Rambox is an interesting project. At one end of the scale, it's a paid-for hosted service that aims to help your productivity, but at the other end, it's an open source client that offers the same functionality running locally with your data stored locally as well. This is all thanks to the magic of npm and Electron. Normally, Electron seems like a cumbersome approach to creating a desktop application, but it's appropriate in the case of Rambox, because the application is itself a way of aggregating various online portals and messaging services. It unifies login with a single password, as well as themes and notifications, along with when to terminate them. When you first start Rambox, you're presented with a huge list of these services. There's 103 in total, and the list includes the usual suspects such as Skype, Slack, Gmail, Twitter, and Linkedin, as well as more esoteric services like ICQ, Steam, and Riot.

You need to enter your account details for at least a few of these for Rambox's functionality to make sense. Each service you enter is then added to your top panel, which will also include notifications on unread messages. You can also add your own custom services, which like everything else, needs to be either messaging (like email) or chat. With that done, you can then aggregate your various services into the same view, and it works quite well. It's certainly less distracting than having multiple windows open and skipping between them all without getting any real work done. You can limit yourself to a few minutes checking updates before closing the main window and getting back to being productive. This is where Rambox works best, especially if your work makes you use several similar services, because you can limit the amount of distraction and close just a single window when you reach EOD.

Project Website

https://github.com/ramboxapp/community-edition

With Rambox you can aggregate all your messaging and chat applications into a single window.

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