I can’t find it now, but there was a Start Menu/Taskbar for Mac OS 9 era Mac’s as well. It was bizarre.
Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
111–120 of 327 posts
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#112I am the target audience for this, from a UX and tech perspective. It addresses a problem I have and for which I periodically audition solutions. A subscription for a menu bar, though, kills it for me. I have apps on Macs that are over 20 years old. Some of those companies don’t exist anymore. I’m not going to risk paying $100 for a decade of your app and hope that your company, or your goodwill, stays around that lo…
Since this is the top comment as of now - hijacking this to introduce a change to pricing: ------ OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later. For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual…
Feedback from a potential customer: I despise 2-device limits. I used DEVONthink for a decade but dropped it because of that exact thing.
At home, I have a Mac Studio[0] set up in my office with my music stuff, and I'm writing this on my MacBoor Air[1] here on my lap in the living room. I also have a work laptop, although it's safely tucked away in my backback right now. My wife has an MBA, too, but that's hers and I don't mess with it. So I'm elbow-deep in Macs that are used solely by me, and I bounce between them regularly.
The 2-device limit is a dealbreaker for me. It's where I stop reading. I don't care if it cures cancer: I won't buy an app that makes me pick and choose which of the devices in my care I can use it on. I'm sympathetic to why vendors pick that limit. I get that you don't want me to buy a single license and spread it around my friends and work circles. That's completely reasonable and understandable. And yet, it completely breaks my use case. I bet I'm far from alone in this.
[0]A previous job let me keep it when I left.
[1]I bought to hack on personal projects instead of using [0], which was work-owned at the time.
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#113Already got indexed by Brave Search's AI:
boringBar: A modern Dock replacement specifically for macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later that organizes windows by desktop, provides thumbnail previews, and includes unread notification badges. It requires a one-time $40 personal license after a 14-day free trial
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#114It looks really good, what makes this different from uBar?
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#115Why does it need to talk to facebook.com, ntp.org, aws.com, cloudflare.com, google.com, and windows.com?
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since this is the top comment as of now - hijacking this to introduce a change to pricing: ------ OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later. For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual…
Feedback from a potential customer: I despise 2-device limits. I used DEVONthink for a decade but dropped it because of that exact thing. At home, I have a Mac Studio[0] set up in my office with my music stuff, and I'm writing this on my MacBoor Air[1] here on my lap in the living room. I also have a work laptop, although it's safely tucked away in my backback right now. My wife has an MBA, too, but that's hers and I…
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how many developers here use LLMs daily, how do you think about defensibility? Tools like this seem relatively easy to reverse-engineer and replicate with enough time and LLM assistance. Did that influence your decision to charge a subscription or the change to a personal license?
>> how do you think about defensibility? defensibility nowadays is app support and development. the more work you pour into it the more defensible it will be. I personally would gladly pay to have app constantly polished and improved. What I would not use is some vibe-coded alternative that was slopped with AI in a day and pushed to github with a tweet "i made a free X alternative" and then abandoned.
how much is there to improve and polish for a taskbar? at most it will be keeping up with macOS throwing breaking changes at you and maybe one or the other weird bug.
but isn't that it?
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since this is the top comment as of now - hijacking this to introduce a change to pricing: ------ OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later. For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual…
Feedback from a potential customer: I despise 2-device limits. I used DEVONthink for a decade but dropped it because of that exact thing. At home, I have a Mac Studio[0] set up in my office with my music stuff, and I'm writing this on my MacBoor Air[1] here on my lap in the living room. I also have a work laptop, although it's safely tucked away in my backback right now. My wife has an MBA, too, but that's hers and I…
You can purchase multiple licenses. If you can afford a dozen computers, you can afford a couple more licenses.
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand a bit on what you mean by "Superpowered tablet os"? I'm tend to think of it as a server os with a DE, but as a backend developer I'm probably biased.
I'm talking about the desktop environment explicitly, not the underlying OS. To me, GNOME and Pantheon (elementaryOS DE) strongly resemble e.g. iPadOS or Android running on a tablet for a few reasons: - Chunky heavily padded touch-optimized UI elements (even when no touch capability is present) - By default, minimize button not present in titlebars - Near total abandonment of menubars in favor of mobile-style "hambur…
Ah. Well then I'll argue my original statement holds. Op himself likened his product to gnome 2. Gnome 3 was released 15 years ago so if anything I was generous in my original comment.
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#120OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later. For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing. A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about i…
alright man i'm gonna buy it you seem p cool. lovely looking software here too
edit: yeah this is good stuff. see some other bug reports here im actually not running into any myself, running 4 workspaces plenty of apps. its so straight forward and simple, the design is fantastic. seems to play nicely with my rectangle app snapping, though it takes a moment for it to resize since less bottom space is available with the bar but as long as i can snap im happy.
edit2: just tried ubar then ended up back on this. #1 reason is because your app will resize my window after i snap with rectangle. i couldn't get ubar to do that, ubar also felt a little more sluggish at times. ubar is more feature filled but something about the simplicity here is kind of exactly what i needed to replace the macos dock, and yours is hitting the mark really well.
i think few buttons (don't even need to be text menu items) for logout/restart/shutdown would be pretty clutch, but outside of that i do be digging this a lot. nice. enjoy my moneys!