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Show HN: A minimalist Mac app that helps track, allocate, and plan your time

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Re: Show HN: A minimalist Mac app that helps track, allocate, and plan your time

#52

A bit Off topic but, why does the mac app store open automatically, is there any way to turn that off? No other kind of link in safari is allowed to open an app like that without confirming it each time.

I wonder how hard Apple has fuzzed that "feature"

Re: Show HN: A minimalist Mac app that helps track, allocate, and plan your time

#54
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No blog post yet but I'm happy to answer any specific questions here. Effortless is a fairly simple app although there were some tricky edge cases to handle like when the task name is too long for the menu bar (especially when dealing with multiple monitors), and how to update the current task in the menu bar when making large edits to the task list. Making the app simple to use and cutting down the list of features…

I for one would love to hear more about your transition as someone who’s been with Python for a while now but struggling to make Swift stick (last attempt was with SwiftUI, which is awesome but very young).

Definitely! I got lucky in the sense that wanting to create Effortless forced me to learn Swift. I wanted much more control than something like Electron or BitBar could give me, and I wanted to make this app a reality. I had also been working professionally with Python for the last few years, and the codebase at my previous company was so large that I started to miss working in a statically typed language.

I didn't do anything that special to learn it. I gave the The Swift Programming Language book (1) a read and then started to get my hands dirty, using Google when needed. I had done some iOS development a long time ago, which also helped. I almost immediately found it just as easy to write as Python (and in some respects easier) but with a stronger type system. It also has a lot of great tooling like Playgrounds. So I guess my advice would be to give yourself a project which you want to use Swift for, ideally where you have no other alternatives. I've also tinkered around with using Vapor to create web servers using Swift, so that might be another option.

1. https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/

Re: Show HN: A minimalist Mac app that helps track, allocate, and plan your time

#55

Hey HN! My name is Julian, and I made Effortless with aracena to solve a problem we were both having: how to focus on exactly one thing at a time. Effortless displays my current task, and a countdown timer in the menu bar, and although it sounds silly, it means that I have a constant visual reminder of what I should be working on. Effortless was also a great excuse to learn Swift and native Mac app development. I'm h…

Could you consider synchronization via Nextcloud?

Re: Show HN: A minimalist Mac app that helps track, allocate, and plan your time

#56
post #44

I'm not in the market for this kind of app, but thank you for making it a straight $9.99 purchase, instead of a $4.99/month SaaS (rental) scheme. Or some bogus in-app purchase that gets negated somewhere along the way when the app auto-updates and the previous in-app purchase is no longer available. I can't tell if it syncs data with my other Apple devices, but if it does, it would be great if it had the option of do…

If that is a problem, I'd rather have it sync with something like nextcloud instead of just another flavor of untrusted proprietary service.

Precisely. Not everyone who's using a Mac is using the entire Apple ecosystem. I use Macs, Android, and Linux, and I am not going to use any Windows/Linux/Mac-specific protocol.

Re: Show HN: A minimalist Mac app that helps track, allocate, and plan your time

#57
post #4

This feels less like a "Show HN" and more like an advertisement.

I mean... aren't all Show HN sort of adverts? How is this different?

It links directly to the Mac App Store which open MAS on my Mac. It's kind of rude. Their web-page does not contain any text describing the product, there is a simple video which could be linked instead. The product is at least 1 year old, judging from comments in the App Store. Usually a Show HN thing is a bit fresher. I agree with OP, this feels less like a Show HN and more like "oh by the way, we should post a Show HN the buy button".
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