ZetaWatch VS clipper-lite

I wrote ZetaWatch ages ago, but it won't do the setup / installation / pool creation, just some of the administration after that.

There is a useful (but not very beautiful) app to put control in the top bar - https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch

After dabbling with early stuff from the sadly scrapped Apple effort, I started my full time Mac ZFS journey in 2011 with the then Z-410, which then became ZEVO which was 10.8 only, and then staying on that (and in turn 10.8 doho) on a Mac Pro 3,1 for a solid 4 years or so. I was really sad when that effort didn't pan out and the company got acquired and then the whole deal was killed, but O3X revived the torch and I moved directly onto that. I've carried my pool forward continuously the whole way, with snapshots and everything, all data scrubbed and known good with no more data rot. It's a damn shame events (software patents) conspired to keep that from becoming a universal native fs, but it's still a wonderful thing and Lundman's amazing consistent efforts have been fantastic. The main site at https://openzfsonosx.org/ has decently active forums for something niche.

Without Apple on board or a much bigger effort ZFS on the Mac will probably always have some real limitations particularly with the GUI. For one of my desktop systems I've migrated to running my home and data folders as HFS or APFS formatted iSCSI targets, so it's still on ZFS underneath but appears native to macOS (and that also means that the effective death of towers isn't a limit on storage). But this remains an incredible project IMO.

Also for anyone who wants some limited GUI interaction capability, there is a small project called ZetaWatch [0] which will put some ZFS control into a menubar widget.

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0: https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch/

To auto-import and easily export pools on Mac OS, I wrote https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch, it can be configured to auto-mount and auto-unlock encrypted datasets too.

I wrote https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch, a ZFS GUI for Mac OS for doing the common jobs: Importing / Exporting pools, unlocking and mounting datasets, starting and monitoring scrubs, and of course looking at the status. I did this in the form of a Menu Bar widget. That makes more sense than a web page, since it's always available / visible.

Compare the 32-bit Windows releases of Temps (42.6mb), made with Electron:

https://github.com/jackd248/temps/releases/tag/v0.7.0

... to the Temps -"lite" remake (4.49mb) using the Sciter engine:

https://github.com/GirkovArpa/temps-lite/releases/tag/v1.1.3

Temps-lite (and of course it's predecessor, Temps) is a desktop weather application for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Provided a free openweathermap.org API key, it displays live weather information for any location in a very attractive, sleek interface. It also shows the forecast for the next 4 days.

To duplicate the very cool rain, snow, and thunder effects, I basically just copied and pasted the original source code. For everything else I redid it in my own way, which probably did not result in very professional-looking code but hey! It works =) Minus some tiny bugs, which I've had help with from someone who's more familiar with Sciter programming.

The original Temps was built/packaged using Electron Builder and Electron Packager (I'm not sure of the difference, to be honest).

The equivalent for Sciter is Quark (quark.sciter.com), and that is what I used to package the HTML, CSS & TIScript files into a single convenient executable which is not only 10x smaller than the Electron version but also starts up way faster (virtually instantly), and has a relatively extremely light memory footprint.

All this without the slightest observable decrease in performance or speed.

One new thing I learned about Sciter while making this project is that it natively supports persisting its equivalent of local storage to a database file, similar to MongoDB.

If you think this is interesting then feel free to check out Clipper-lite, which is the same idea. An Electron app remade using Sciter:

https://github.com/GirkovArpa/clipper-lite