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Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS

boringbar.app

161–170 of 327 posts

Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS

#161
post #99

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 pricing. A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about i…

Put the $40 in the app store, I'll buy it just to support this move. (Though it should be $20.) For business, I would also pay $20/seat in Apple Business's app store (no quantity discount needed), so it's part of our MDM software for Windows users unfamiliar with Mac. Note that subscriptions are not available to businesses using that channel, only flat purchases. All you have to do is have a flat purchase in the reta…

Apps like these unfortunately cannot be put on the App Store as they use some Window Server shenanigans to make it work. boringBar is notarized by Apple and will work well with Gatekeeper if that makes it any better.

Regarding business licensing - I know I need to make changes to the fixed number of users limit. The change for it is there but I need some more testing before that gets pushed out.

Apart from that - why do you think the tiered pricing is bad? As you have more users the price per user goes down essentially to ~$1.5 per year at the highest tier.

Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS

#166
post #99

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 pricing. A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about i…

Here's where this can be awful - I have a few pieces of software that are identical to this. After a few years I switch machines out and can't reactivate them and I'm SOL.

Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS

#168
post #160
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it seems like small businesses like this get squeezed by these demands to make everything cheaper while the big corporations ignore it and stick to their pricing. I’m not sure OP should have capitulated. Someone who loves this tool will probably gladly pay more.

The question is what is the proportion of people loving it vs liking it.

The proportion gets a lot easier to deal with as the price goes up.

Is it easier to convince one person to pay $100 or 100 people to pay $1?

Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS

#170
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there - I ran into the same issue myself, but sadly I still haven't found a way to show the badge count without opening the app. I'm still experimenting with it. I expected some pushback on subscriptions, but after trying uBar and running into quite a few issues with it I wanted to build something that feels reliable and polished. I’m pretty much all-in on the Apple ecosystem now, even though I only switched ~6 mo…

Just spitballing here, but I know notifications are stored in a sqlite3 database. You might be able to query the count based on application type and use that?

Are they? I'm not so sure. If they are you could set a watcher on it to receive filesystem notifications when it changes.

I think you can get the info from LaunchServices using `lsappinfo` command.

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