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Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

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Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150MB might not seem like much, but it really is a lot. iStat Menus, which is tracking a lot more data across my system to render its multiple graphs is using ~85MB total. Bearing in mind that many users are going to have 5 things like this in their menubar, they can't all use this amount.

That's a good point. There's definitely ways to optimize for less memory usage. We've been prioritizing feature development, but plan to focus on this before we start scaling.

This should be a very high priority issue. The more features you'll add, the harder it'll be to perform any heavy optimizations without rewriting major parts.

~150MB is a huge memory footprint for something that just sits in my menubar idle. Not all Macs have >16GBs of RAM (and even if they did, this is pretty wasteful). I'm also concerned about the battery life.

I'm pretty sure you'll eventually reach a point where it's no longer possible to optimize it any more (nonetheless Electron is just a Chrome instance). If you suddenly realize the whole thing would be twice as good if you'd just make a native app instead, it's better to have no features than have to rewrite all of them.

I know this doesn't sound constructive, but why go with Electron in first place? It's a menubar widget which the users are expected to be running all the time. There's a difference between running a simple applet and a whole browser instance.

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#132
post #87
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then won't notifications from this utility also get buried?

>Then won't notifications from this utility also get buried? I think the idea is that the upcoming calendar/appointment notification is live and always on the menubar . See example screenshot from their web landing page: https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png I'm building a similar calendar notification tool for personal use on Windows so I understand the value of this. Calendar notifications via e…

> See example screenshot from their web landing page: https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png

If this is all you need, why not just use an open source alternative? I'm using MeetingBar (https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar) and it covers all of these "issues". It even sends notifications, it's lightweight, scriptable and doesn't cost me as much as a Photoshop subscription.

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for it. It makes my life easier and saves me time. It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink it.

are you an investor as well?

I'm not

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for it. It makes my life easier and saves me time. It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink it.

Genuinely curious why not pay for fantastical? It has basically the same widget, plus an iPhone and Mac app for a 1/3 of the price? Not to be mean, but this seems like it only got traction because they got accepted to YC on another idea, otherwise would have been lost in the sea of dozens of other much more full featured or free calendar solutions?

It's been a while since I used fantastical but I didn't like it. I don't remember why to be honest.

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#135
I tried out Superpowered and while it's more polished than its competitors, it has a few downsides other commenters have already touched upon (pricing, memory use, and personally, the name hits too close to home to Superhuman.)

I've found that the best alternative is Slapdash. [0] Connect your calendar and then just hit cmd + J and boom -- Zoom is running. Many more connections are amazing as well, eg. deep Dropbox and Drive integration.

[0] https://slapdash.com

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#136
With so many of these widgets now (most of which are free and/or open source) I’d be very surprised if this doesn’t show up as a feature baked directly into the next macOS.

I use Meeter. It was the first I came across and it is free. It’s rather useful but not life changing. I’ve recently noticed that Siri notifications have started appearing, prompting the link to join meetings and they usually appear a fraction of a second before Meeter’s notification.

I get that Superpowered is an MVP (and a very very, maybe too, polished one at that!) and now I’m quite fascinated to see how this turns in a YC growth business.

Re: Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar

#137

If you don’t want to spend 10$/month for Superpowered, checkout trymeeter.com. My cofounder and I built Meeter about a year ago and it’s fully free currently.

How will you continue developing your product if it is free and closed-source?

Meeter still earns subscription revenue via SetApp. The company running Meeter now is funded and builds it into a larger ecosystem [0]

[0] https://bardeen.ai

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