very, very cool thanks for making this.
Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
131–140 of 185 posts
Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's 1st of May here Is that date significant somewhere? It was an nice sunny Friday for me.
May Day - like labour day in Canada/USA... but on the first of May
I would argue nothing about American Labor Day has anything to do with labor at all. Honestly we should just rename it “Summer’s End” because there is literally no theme. The ad flyers for the sales on that weekend have, if any perceivable theme at all, red, white and blue / Stars and Stripes for some reason. It’s traditional that school starts the day after it, but in many places that’s been dragged several weeks sooner into August for some sick reason.
We just don’t even have any holiday that honors labor, laborers, or labor unions.
Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can put it in a secondary onclick taskbar with Ice (similarly to Windows)
There's also Bartender, Hidden Bar etc., but they all come with some downsides. I just don't get why Apple doesn't recognize this as a problem. Do the engineers working on macOS all have two of these 5:1 aspect ratio ultra wide monitors!?
Worse - even if you have two, Apple just duplicates the menu bar on both screens.
Especially with the abomination that is The Notch, the menu bar has been overcrowded for years. No offense to OP. I’m talking about the 5 or so items I can’t get rid of in there.
Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
#134This reminds me ChromeOS has some USB-C cable identification superpowers: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1pyojjd/comme...
Not sure if it's using the same thing this MacOS thing is doing. In the link the author explains that the cable e-Marker contains a "Discover Identity" message that you can read and display in ChromeOS. Most ordinary Windows hardware can't read it because of BIOS limitations, but Chromebooks can. I'm guessing Macs can too.
Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
#135Is it also possible to read the e-marker on non-Apple devices? Linux or windows?
This would be so useful...
Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
#136is there a CLI?
Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's 1st of May here Is that date significant somewhere? It was an nice sunny Friday for me.
It's May Day, which is a labour holiday everywhere except North America commemorating the Haymarket Affair when American police brutally repressed striking workers . In North America we have Labor Day in September to distance it from the historical associations with actual organizing and police brutality.
May Day has been around significantly longer than the Haymarket Affair.. a couple thousands years at least.
Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making 1 click to access is faster than typing the app name in finder. Dock is usually full and used for different type of apps. Makes also constantly visible output possible with standard ui patterns.
> Dock is usually full My menu bar is also full and, unlike the Dock, I can’t resize it to fit more.
Sure you can.
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2
Replace write with delete to undo.
Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can put it in a secondary onclick taskbar with Ice (similarly to Windows)
Just a heads up Ice is abandoned and broken on upcoming versions of MacOS. I still need to look into an alternative
Thaw is a fork of Ice which is maintained and woks on Tahoe.
Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, thanks. We understand what a menu bar is. How is this conducive to the typical usage pattern of an app like this?
For some reason the app supports a separate standalone window mode as well [0]. It's not clear why the developer took the trouble to support two different modes when the menubar mode doesn't seem to add anything (like a live-updating icon for throughput). Well, I can think of one reason why it wasn't that much more trouble. François Chollet had a nice tweet [1] on why removing human cognitive friction is resulting in…
> It's not clear why
People asked for it in these comments here and the developer added it.