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Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

sephware.com

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Re: Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

#31

Post by tptacek »

sephoric wrote: post #3
sephoric wrote: post #2

Greetings fellow hackers! Author of Autumn here! I've been writing Autumn on and off for a few months, because there's something really satisfying and rewarding about automating something you do often, and then using that to automate more, and building upward in a cycle. That, plus I wanted to see how close to building a "legit IDE" I could get while completely faking it with WKWebViews. So Autumn kind of grew from t…

Also, sorry for the terrible website. Web design is not my forte, I'm an app guy, and this was the quickest thing I could hack together in a couple days. Also I'm aware of the issues with the video demo, I'm uploading the file to YouTube so it should be fixed soon!

This site is great. It's clean, easy to read, and looks professional.

It's hard for me to evaluate how useful this would be to my workflow without seeing the API, and it looks like I have to actually run the app to do that. It might be worth putting a copy on the website.

Re: Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

#33

Post by jarpineh »

Yes. I was just trying to learn Hammerspoon. This is more familiar language and has an IDE to boot.

7 days for trial isn’t that much for productivity app. Then again its only 8 dollars or so.

I wish there was repository or discussion forum for automation scripts.

Also, I would like to react to Mac notifications. That has been seemingly impossible to do...

Re: Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

#34

Post by sephoric »

tptacek wrote: post #31
sephoric wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, sorry for the terrible website. Web design is not my forte, I'm an app guy, and this was the quickest thing I could hack together in a couple days. Also I'm aware of the issues with the video demo, I'm uploading the file to YouTube so it should be fixed soon!

This site is great. It's clean, easy to read, and looks professional. It's hard for me to evaluate how useful this would be to my workflow without seeing the API, and it looks like I have to actually run the app to do that. It might be worth putting a copy on the website.

Thank you for the advice, you're the second person to bring that up, and it seems like a fine idea, so I will do that this morning :)

[UPDATE] I have added the full and complete documentation to the website, which I hope will help you decide whether you'd like to try Autumn!

Re: Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

#35

Post by sephoric »

jarpineh wrote: post #33

Yes. I was just trying to learn Hammerspoon. This is more familiar language and has an IDE to boot. 7 days for trial isn’t that much for productivity app. Then again its only 8 dollars or so. I wish there was repository or discussion forum for automation scripts. Also, I would like to react to Mac notifications. That has been seemingly impossible to do...

Forum for discussion is actually one of my highest priorities for this month! I'm not settled on whether to use something like Discourse, phpBB, a subreddit, a mailing list, a custom forum, or a GitHub repo with Issues enabled. This requires more thought, and maybe more discussion, but it was on the todo list since day one of writing Autumn.

I will look into reacting to Mac notifications, that sounds like it could be useful but I'm not sure I understand what it means. Could you elaborate?

Re: Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

#36

Post by sephoric »

DonHopkins wrote: post #22
sephoric wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slate is great, it was one of the first window managers I ever tried. In fact Slate inspired a good portion of the early versions of Autumn. You can almost think of Autumn as Slate with an embedded IDE, built-in documentation, developer console, and an API designed with TypeScript in mind.

I was also quite inspired by Slate. Unfortunately there hasn't been any activity with it for about 5 years or so. It's great you're picking up the mantel and running with it, because the essential idea is great! I was interested in Slate because I was looking for a good way to implement pie menus for a Mac window manager. And I'd already implemented pie menus for HTML, so I wanted to come up with a way to use that co…

This sounds incredibly useful and is something I am going to strongly look into and consider as a future (separate) project. Thanks for sharing these thoughts!

Re: Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

#37

Post by sephoric »

chris_st wrote: post #20
sephoric wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon's model relies on monthly fees, which is something that philosophically I am against with software like Autumn, because it's not a continual service but a product that took a finite time to complete, so it should have a finite price. I also took counsel of someone who makes over $10k / month in monthly donations for open source work, who strongly recommends against it for personal products but encourages it f…

Patreon has a per-accomplishment tier, used by (e.g.) the "Pepper and Carrot" webcomic[1] to fund each page individually. You might consider that model for features... [1] https://www.peppercarrot.com (highly recommended if your tolerance for cute/silly is high :-) Oh, and the author's patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/davidrevoy

Thank you, I did not know about this, it looks like an interesting path worth considering.

Re: Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

#38

Post by sephoric »

snek wrote: post #11
sephoric wrote: post #2

Greetings fellow hackers! Author of Autumn here! I've been writing Autumn on and off for a few months, because there's something really satisfying and rewarding about automating something you do often, and then using that to automate more, and building upward in a cycle. That, plus I wanted to see how close to building a "legit IDE" I could get while completely faking it with WKWebViews. So Autumn kind of grew from t…

I feel like tools like this, which are intended to be used by developers for their own personal use, will have trouble succeeding if they aren't oss. It would be nice if the documentation was available without having to download this, so people could see what the API is like. It would also be super duper epic if this supported ESM properly.

I have updated the website to include the full and complete documentation, I hope this will help you to know whether you want to try Autumn!

Re: Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

#39

Post by jarpineh »

sephoric wrote: post #35
jarpineh wrote: post #33

Yes. I was just trying to learn Hammerspoon. This is more familiar language and has an IDE to boot. 7 days for trial isn’t that much for productivity app. Then again its only 8 dollars or so. I wish there was repository or discussion forum for automation scripts. Also, I would like to react to Mac notifications. That has been seemingly impossible to do...

Forum for discussion is actually one of my highest priorities for this month! I'm not settled on whether to use something like Discourse, phpBB, a subreddit, a mailing list, a custom forum, or a GitHub repo with Issues enabled. This requires more thought, and maybe more discussion, but it was on the todo list since day one of writing Autumn. I will look into reacting to Mac notifications, that sounds like it could be…

Thank you for your response.

If the subject is interesting/useful I don’t believe forum software matters that much to us users. All those that you mentioned would work fine, I’d say.

Notification issues I have tried to solve with Bettertouchtool and Hammerspoon, but I havent been able to find notification API access in them. Though I don’t know if Apple provides such access to notifications. Use cases I have are reacting to Slack, iTerm, Mail and browser notifications as events. I’d like to access the notification content in plain text or object and then decide how to process it. Depending on message content, time of day, place, connected network &c I could put up rules on how to proceed. I could show notifications on touchbar or on screen in less distracting ways than what notification center allows. I could pool certain notifications and check them all in one place, such as bot messages from various slack channels.

Notifications seem easier way to get information moving between apps than trying to use their specific APIs (if such is even available). Sort of light weight RPC from apps to my custom tools.

Re: Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

#40

Post by sephoric »

jarpineh wrote: post #39
sephoric wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forum for discussion is actually one of my highest priorities for this month! I'm not settled on whether to use something like Discourse, phpBB, a subreddit, a mailing list, a custom forum, or a GitHub repo with Issues enabled. This requires more thought, and maybe more discussion, but it was on the todo list since day one of writing Autumn. I will look into reacting to Mac notifications, that sounds like it could be…

Thank you for your response. If the subject is interesting/useful I don’t believe forum software matters that much to us users. All those that you mentioned would work fine, I’d say. Notification issues I have tried to solve with Bettertouchtool and Hammerspoon, but I havent been able to find notification API access in them. Though I don’t know if Apple provides such access to notifications. Use cases I have are reac…

That does sound very useful, yeah. I'll look into whether it can be done, but my gut feeling is that it can't. Typically apps can only respond to their own generated Apple notifications, not those generated from other apps.
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