Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–207 of 207 posts

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

#201

Post by 1-more »

sequoia wrote: post #195
1-more wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality. Dog you can sync Google calendar with your built in calendar then run Next Meeting[0] in your menu bar. You can even have a global shortcut to open the meeting link. All my work meetings are in scheduled through Google Calendar and take place in zoom, and all I d…

Can you elaborate on mapping a keystroke to opening a meeting link? Outside of google cal + google meet calendar apps don’t typically recognize meeting links as something to promote.

Sure. When we create meetings in Google Calendar (in the desktop browser; never tried anywhere else) we can add a video conferencing link to the invitation. These can either be a Google Meet link, or a Zoom meeting link (through our Zoom integration with Google Calendar). I have linked macOS's Calendar.app with Google Calendar. In Calendar.app this link is still present inside of the calendar event in the LOCATION field[0] although you can't actually see or edit it in there, odd. Then Next Meeting makes a drop down menu in my menubar where the title is the name of my next meeting. Clicking any of the items in the menu opens Calendar where I need to click the Zoom link in the text of the description of the meeting. However if I hit my shortcut key (with or without Next Meeting's menu open) it opens up the meeting link in the browser which then, in JS, does something like

    window.location = `zoommtg://us02web.zoom.us/join?action=join&confno=${meetingIdFromUrl}`
thusly opening my meeting in zoom. I'm guessing that all Next Meeting does is run the command line utility `open` with the contents of the LOCATION field from the ICS file corresponding to the entry. Actually I looked at the version history and since it used to always open them in Chrome that's probably not the case. Also I tried to write an app that would call command line utilities and it was a bear to get the permissions. Possibly impossible.

The only public code[1] I could find for this project by this author is 13 years old and lacks any code to open the meeting links or handle hotkeys of any kind. The github user has a different name than the project author (who has his own empty github profile elsewhere) so

[0] In fact we can see this by using a recursive grep in ~/Library for the name of one of my meetings. This turned up ~/Library/Calendars/.caldav/.calendar/Events/@googlecom-.ics

[1] https://github.com/imagine/nextmeeting

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

#202

Post by 1-more »

sequoia wrote: post #195
1-more wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality. Dog you can sync Google calendar with your built in calendar then run Next Meeting[0] in your menu bar. You can even have a global shortcut to open the meeting link. All my work meetings are in scheduled through Google Calendar and take place in zoom, and all I d…

Can you elaborate on mapping a keystroke to opening a meeting link? Outside of google cal + google meet calendar apps don’t typically recognize meeting links as something to promote.

For just the tiniest part of a second I held hope that you were Sequoia Capital and you were very cross that this project existed. I see now that you are not. This whole thing is still hilarious.

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

#203

Post by z0xz0xz0x »

I seriously don't want to deride the product (and it is just a product right now, not much else) but personally - even if this widget was doing 10x the functionality it is now, the internal debate I would have about paying $10 a month for yet another SaaS would make it almost impossible for me to pay that $10 a month. The truth is 99% of people who work for corporate jobs wouldn't pay their own money to enhance their productivity at work. I can -maybe- see freelancers and consultants using this. But then again, there are so many free alternatives as people have pointed out. I think there is an identity crisis here. Y'all need to take to heart that backlash you're getting here because HN is full of early tech adopters and if even these people can't see the point of the product, no one else will.

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

#204

Post by Nilef »

rangera wrote: post #151
Nilef wrote: post #146

Love the fact you can click Zoom etc links straight from the bar, thats super handy Would pay maybe $2-3/month, $10 just seems way too heavy right now. Maybe in future for your whole SaaS notifications piece and I can see the value if it essentially shows me all of the valuable things going on in my business and nothing superfulous , but sadly $10 I can't justify for just the calendar

I recommend Dato [1] for joining zoom meetings quickly from the menu bar. And it does all the Itsycal stuff too. It's a $6.99 one-time purchase. [1] https://sindresorhus.com/dato

Great rec, thanks !!

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

#205

Post by andrewmin »

HHalvi wrote: post #71

I use Fantastical 3 which not just puts a calendar in your menu bar but also solves for most (if not all) of your calendaring needs. All of it for ~40$ a year which allows you to use it also on your Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. P.S: Not affiliated with Fantastical in any way, just a happy and paying user for a few years now.

Fantastical also has a great click-to-join button. When I first saw this, I thought the post was someone who discovered that feature... it's the same feature.

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

#206

Post by andrewmin »

austenallred wrote: post #134
tannedNerd wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fantastical has this feature though. It would be overkill, but you could only use it for this feature and it would be half the cost!

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

#207

Post by yoav »

Your app actually solves exactly the right problem for me and it looks and acts exactly how I’d want it to. I think you really nailed it and your mention of unifying slack and github comments sounds very appealing.

$10/month is priced way too high. That’s the combined price of slack and github for just a more efficient way to see notifications.

If I was in a smaller startup I might consider paying $1-$2/month out of pocket or expensed to my productivity budget at a bigger org, if you had the github+ slack thing and the calendar thing.

If I’m paying monthly then I expect lots of very rich updates or new products added to the lineup.

I personally think either $10/year with more widgets and tools is a good price point but it also limits you to the people who need all the tools you’re building which shrinks every time you add a new tool.

So maybe instead go with a one-time purchase option of $10 for just this calendar widget, and any new significantly better version or other tool would be another $10 to upgrade or buy the other widget. That’s effectively recurring pricing if you continue to deliver new features but it lets users value each thing individually and only buy what they want

Post reply on HN