I'm not the target audience for this, but THANK YOU for putting a description in the title, instead of letting me eagerly click it thinking it might be a speeds/feeds/stickout calculator for a lathe boring bar or something.
Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
71–80 of 327 posts
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#72Wow, this looks very clean. I'm not the target audience, but if I was looking for a tool in this category, this would be highly attractive to me. Very subtle design that isn't distracting or busy. Well done! Edit: Ok, feedback. Please know that I'm a junky for independent Mac apps that I find interesting. This is interesting to me. This feedback is entirely meant to be constructive. I like the app so far and I want i…
Wow - thank you so much for the feedback. Let me go through this. 1. That might be a good idea. Do you think adjusting the size of the bar from the settings makes it any better? 2. That seems like a bug. There's glass theme for Tahoe - but I think restarting boringBar might help here. I'll check it out. 3. Fair. I did not think of this use case. 4. Thumbnails have a blue hue for active windows as of now. Could you pl…
1. It wouldn't in this specific case. The photo is of a sunset and the ground in the foreground is completely black for about 20% of the bottom due to contrast with the sun.
2. Still holds after multiple relaunches. Strange.
3. Cool. Looking forward to it!
4. I guess my system is causing multiple GUI bugs to present. I don't see a blue highlight when I mouse-over thumbnails.
10. Oh, I'm a dope. I even referenced the traffic light controls earlier in the comment. It somehow sailed over my head that the thing I was asking for was right there. Just tried it and it worked. However, I closed the only open window for an app and that thumbnail remained after the window was gone and the app had exited. That doesn't seem correct to me. But yes it's implemented and I got stupid for a moment while poking around.
One other thing that I noticed after exiting the app was that all the windows that had been minimized to the Dock were no longer minimized. That's a tiny papercut. Minimizing windows is a form of window management and everything got reset. Not the end of the world, but unexpected and mildly disrupting.
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair point. The billing part of it is managed via Stripe - I'll put up the update/cancel subscription part on the Customer Billing panel soon.
Consider adding a lifetime option next to your sub options. Consumer purchase behavior is highly impulsive and irrational. Businesses are very rational and like subs, but for many people, subscription fatigue is a real thing. Make the lifetime option 3-10x the annual rate; done. People will buy it. In my app I set it at 3x (but my annual sub is quite high; 6/mo, 30/y or 100 lifetime) but other apps, like Halide, have…
It is utterly bizarre that you portray consumers as irrational for not wanting subs and businesses as rational for wanting subs. Both are rational in their own interests: businesses want subs because it means more money and more control in the long run. Consumers don't want subs because it means paying more money in the long run and eventually having their software taken away from them if the company goes under, makes an anti-consumer update, etc. Consumers are not irrational just because they don't want to give you money every month forever.
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#74While I don't use a Mac as my primary anymore, I'm surprised I like the look of this! It actually looks quite Mac-like as well. Subscription is a big nope here, though. Especially for Mac software, I'd expect something where you pay for one major version, that is guaranteed to works on specific macOS versions, and gets minor bugfix updates too. But maybe the next macOS version requires a newer major version update to…
Please don't overindex on this comment OP, $10 a year is completely reasonable and the status quo they describe has killed so much software for so little benefit It's a subscription with extra steps and worse retention.
I didn't downvote, but just to be clear - I'm not saying $10 for lifetime updates. Lifetime updates are a terrible idea and, yes, that does kill off software.
$10 is too low for a one-off purchase as well, I'm not saying to lowball the price. $29 for a small utility could be reasonable, and that gives you some room to offer discount pricing / sales if you want. As for major version upgrades, I'd be imagining a typical 50% off, $15 to buy an upgrade to v2 if the customer wants it. Of course, not every customer will want that.
You could offer both a subscription and a one-off purchase. It might put off some customers that you're even offering a subscription, but at least then you're offering everyone what they might want. And if you offer both, you'll have real data on what customers actually prefer, if you don't have that data already.
And as others have said - it's their business, they can choose their sales model! Offered only as a friendly suggestion and potential customer feedback.
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#75Subscriptions for apps that require absolutely no infrastructure to run make absolutely no sense to me. Hard pass.
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair point. The billing part of it is managed via Stripe - I'll put up the update/cancel subscription part on the Customer Billing panel soon.
Consider adding a lifetime option next to your sub options. Consumer purchase behavior is highly impulsive and irrational. Businesses are very rational and like subs, but for many people, subscription fatigue is a real thing. Make the lifetime option 3-10x the annual rate; done. People will buy it. In my app I set it at 3x (but my annual sub is quite high; 6/mo, 30/y or 100 lifetime) but other apps, like Halide, have…
> Consumer purchase behavior is highly impulsive and irrational.
This is correct. It’s quite possible to both satisfy more customers and work within your constraints.
Eg $30 bucks lifetime would be nice. You could put it in small print below the main pricing to avoid decision fatigue and keep things streamlined for subs.
Often those early adopters appreciate and become advocates. Subs fatigue is a real thing
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#77Fantastic work, but ubar is going to eat your lunch with that subscription
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't overindex on this comment OP, $10 a year is completely reasonable and the status quo they describe has killed so much software for so little benefit It's a subscription with extra steps and worse retention.
Why not offer both? I personally dislike subscriptions to the point where I’d gladly pay more to own, and as this thread shows, I’m not alone. So why not offer both?
Why offer both?
Some people will take the subscription with extra steps and worse retention and I'm saying the product will be worse off for it. Why not just offer the thing with the simpler messaging*, better retention, and better outlook for actually being supported down the road even if it's not a massive success?
* 1 year = 365 days, not when a new major version is subjectively justified
Honestly anyone who'd over index on people claiming they'd pay except $10 a year is just too much for a major utility or subscriptions are just too exotic for them is doomed unless they learn about conversion rates: I don't get the vibe OP is unaware though based on their comments here.
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#79I 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…
I think that’s a fair question. My thinking is pretty simple: most people will probably choose the basic 2-device plan, which works out to about $0.85 per month. For an app like this, I think that is a reasonable price. Another reason is that a lot of Mac apps charge a one-time fee upfront, but then require paid upgrades later. In practice, that often ends up being similar to paying for a few years of ongoing support…
Price-wise it's reasonable but the general feeling I and others have is subscription fatigue. It's no one subscription's fault, but in aggregate a lot of us are done with it. App looks nice, good luck.
Re: Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really true if what you want is a full macOS-style desktop experience with a few choice features from elsewhere bolted on. Linux desktops are predominantly Windows-style or minimal tiling thing, with the exceptions (GNOME, Pantheon) bearing only surface-level Mac aesthetics and being more comparable to superpowered tablet OS experiences.
MacOS is neutered for any advanced or even power user compared to practically any Linux desktop experience. Trying to just resize or remove a window should convince you of that instantly.
That statement makes no sense. X11 works fine on macOS and running it in rootful mode with Gnome essentially works the same way it would work on an OS that uses the Linux kernel.
Granted, it will not integrate with anything hardware-wise by itself (unless there's a package for it - if not, macOS still handles it, and Aqua/Quartz will keep running in the background anyway), but if what you wanted was something that is KDE or GNOME running with its own WM on its own X11 server, doing the exact same thing you'd get if you're running a Linux distro, that's been natively possible for over 15 years.
If a power user loses their power based on what GUI happens to be in front of them, how much of a power user was the power user to begin with?