I 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 long.
Since this is the top comment as of now - hijacking this to introduce a change to pricing:
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OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app
It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later.
For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing.
A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about it. I still care a lot about long-term maintenance for an app like this, but I think this is a better balance.
What was your justification for the monthly fee in the first place?
There is a model that worked for decades: If you spent a _significant_ amount of work enhancing an existing tool you'd release a new major version. The would be a discount for license holders of the old version. Why reinvent the world over and over again?
To me it seems like small businesses like this get squeezed by these demands to make everything cheaper while the big corporations ignore it and stick to their pricing.
I’m not sure OP should have capitulated. Someone who loves this tool will probably gladly pay more.
I personally prefer the monthly payments of a nominal amount where $2-8/month is my usual small app tolerance. It feels like I’m supporting the development of useful tools while having the option to discontinue my patronage when the tool is no longer relevant or useful to my workflow. This gives products a natural lifespan and aligns the developer incentives to keep the product functional and continue developing new features.
Old guard will say what they will about software licensing but at the end of the day it’s all the same.
I get it now that folks absolutely loathe the idea of subscriptions - that too for a taskbar. In hindsight I too find it hideous but I wanted the pricing to reflect the effort that went into this - wrestling with the Window Server and Xcode for multiple weekends over the past months.
But hey, the masses have spoken - and a perpetual license it is. Vox populi, vox dei.
Given how many developers here use LLMs daily, how do you think about defensibility? Tools like this seem relatively easy to reverse-engineer and replicate with enough time and LLM assistance. Did that influence your decision to charge a subscription or the change to a personal license?
That's the reason why I added a subscription in the first place - you would pay a dirt-cheap price for a "boring" product with an added insurance that someone will be there to support it.
People will replicate it, sure, but supporting it regularly is another thing. I guess the majority wanted a perpetual license - so it's a win for the masses.
Personally, I dare not replace the Dock with Windows-style task bar for fear that my OLED display might have burn-in on it.
Yet, when I need an alternative, I would rather make an APP for my own.
defensibility nowadays is app support and development. the more work you pour into it the more defensible it will be.
I personally would gladly pay to have app constantly polished and improved. What I would not use is some vibe-coded alternative that was slopped with AI in a day and pushed to github with a tweet "i made a free X alternative" and then abandoned.
how much is there to improve and polish for a taskbar? at most it will be keeping up with macOS throwing breaking changes at you and maybe one or the other weird bug.
Honestly, I have tried to really cut down on my usage of 3rd-party dependencies when possible. In a way, it's kind of freeing. Whatever I still need, I write myself. If I cannot write it, then I try to find something FOSS. If I find nothing, then I consider purchasing something.
For example, I am rolling my own window manager (that needs some much needed TLC). I ditched Alfred for Spotlight. Though Alfred is better, I will survive just fine. And the list goes on.
I am not trying to take a dig at the OP. I am sure he or she put effort into this application. But I am genuinely curious -- does anybody actually need this software? Cmd+Tab, a decent window manager, and Spotlight would solve the same problems for free.
Feedback from a potential customer: I despise 2-device limits. I used DEVONthink for a decade but dropped it because of that exact thing.
At home, I have a Mac Studio[0] set up in my office with my music stuff, and I'm writing this on my MacBoor Air[1] here on my lap in the living room. I also have a work laptop, although it's safely tucked away in my backback right now. My wife has an MBA, too, but that's hers and I don't mess with it. So I'm elbow-deep in Macs that are used solely by me, and I bounce between them regularly.
The 2-device limit is a dealbreaker for me. It's where I stop reading. I don't care if it cures cancer: I won't buy an app that makes me pick and choose which of the devices in my care I can use it on. I'm sympathetic to why vendors pick that limit. I get that you don't want me to buy a single license and spread it around my friends and work circles. That's completely reasonable and understandable. And yet, it completely breaks my use case. I bet I'm far from alone in this.
[0]A previous job let me keep it when I left.
[1]I bought to hack on personal projects instead of using [0], which was work-owned at the time.
Trust and respect, which is a 2-way street. I've bought some relatively expensive apps (the pro version of nearly everything Omni Group makes, Things, etc. etc. etc.) and all of them let you install and use the apps on all of your computers. They're licensed per person, not per device. I despise technical controls on this for the same reason I despise DRM on physical media: it's an inconvenience to rightful owners and a temporary speed bump to pirates.
I'm not about to abuse my OmniFocus licenses, even though I could. They sold me a great product at a reasonable price, with permission to throw a copy on everything I own so I can use it no matter which chair I'm sitting at. They trust and respect me, and I trust and respect them.
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 anyway.
I also think a low-cost subscription sets a clearer expectation that the app will continue to be maintained and kept working as macOS changes. For software like this, where OS updates can easily break things, that felt like the more honest model.
Adding on to this, apps that hook into window management and multi-monitor behavior can break in subtle ways over time. I ran into some of that with uBar on my setup, especially around multi-monitor use and waking from sleep, and I wanted boringBar’s pricing to match the expectation of continued support and fixes.
I 100% understand why you are using a subscription-based model. It makes sense, and I agree it's the most honest model given that you have to continually support it and you don't want to have to either over-promise on extended support, and offer refunds if you can't fulfill that promise.
I just hate managing subscriptions.
If you gave me the option to require manual subscription renewal, rather than auto-renewal, I would 100% buy this right now. Basically allow me to purchase for 1 year then click a button to confirm that I'm still getting value out of the product. If I don't click that button then you should assume I'm no longer interested and cancel my subscription.
(I don't like using my mac but sometimes I have to use it for work, and I wish I had this.)
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 12/y or 80 lifetime last I checked.
You get guaranteed revenue, and you get it upfront - better for cashflow. And you can always tell customers “if you don’t like subs buy the lifetime option”.
> 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
GoodSync's pricing is notable: $20/year for five devices, but stackable. I've signed up for 10+ years. GoodSync needs central infrastructure to work, so the ongoing pricing makes sense.
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.
That’s an economic concept, not a dig at consumers. It’s well known (hell, there’s a nobel laureate for it) that humans are irrational when it comes to economics.
Was the thesis of the fake Nobel recipient that consumers are irrational specifically because they prefer one-time purchases to subscriptions? Otherwise I'm not really sure what the relevance of bringing it up in this very specific context it.
Thank you for replying. I understand your perspective — the subscription is a signal that you will maintain the app long-term, and to provide the revenue for it. Also, it looks cheap. A few counter-points, while we’re talking:
> For an app like this, I think that’s a reasonable price.
Except that it’s not a price, it’s an access fee, and those are very different. If it were a price I’d have the thing I paid for — a binary to use as a like. Instead what I have is a token that you can revoke at any time for any reason, including you getting hit by a car or getting bored with the app.
> a low-cost subscription sets a clearer expectation that the app will continue to be maintained …
Forgive the bluntness, but it does no such thing. This app just launched. No one has reason to believe the little business behind it will still exist in 12 months. Death rate for products like this is very high. A subscription from me is a bet that you will still be around in a year, and you have zero track record.
I've taken the feedback here and added a perpetual personal license for 2 devices at $40 - it includes 2 years of updates and the app will keep on working after that.
I don't think anyone is trying to have you get rid of the subscription option in order to have the non-subscription option. Same with defendending the good value - whether it's subscription or not is orthogonal with whether it's priced reasonably.
Low cost subscriptions as the only options can also give multiple vibes, not just one intended one, as well. The one you highighlight is somewhat optimistic takeaway "the publisher is fair with this price and I only need to pay for however much I actually use - what a great guarantee this will be good for the long run".
Another valid takeaway is basically the opposite "It's not clear if the publisher is committed to this software. The only payment option they think they can sell is for just $10 and are only showing commitment in being around for up to just 1 year - are they really confident in the product or value"? Even more doubtful are those suspicious of new dealings "It's fair enough now but do I really want to get used to it for a year and then the price is jacked up by renewal?" (this can be solved with more than a non-subscription option too. E.g. longer term subscriptions, only if you truly are trying to advertise "years of support to come" can help provide the feeling of commitment).
Even in the case one wants to start/stick with the subscription having a lifetime and/or versioned option only adds more to all of the things you listed as reasons for offering a subscription alone. E.g. seeing that "lifetime is equal to at least x years" or "y year term subscription" and then the user going with the 1 year subscription is strictly better signaling to them than just having a 1 year subscription.
The only thing suspicious from your comment is the current subscription option is 1 year, the ask was for longer/perpetual options, and the justification given was the price per month seems great. Other than the absolute value of the price per month is lower and sounds easier to defend, there doesn't seem to be anything about your product, the subscription for it, or the context made the cost per month the relevant interval for a user to consider the value.
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.
I have the same bias as the parent. I'd rather pay $50 one time than $9 a year even if I throw it away after 4 years.
But the main reason I wouldn't install it despite being happy customizing linux is that it's yet another black box I need to trust and that knows way too much. It's really insane how much you need to compromise your security on macos to have a decent developer experience.
While 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 run, in which case you pay an upgrade fee to buy the next major version - or maybe the next major version has new features you might want to upgrade to as well.
My old Macs are stuck on 10.13, and I see Ubar mentioned elsewhere in this thread and that it's still compatible with 10.13. I might consider the $30 one off price to buy Ubar and keep it forever, but I wouldn't do a $10 subscription.
Agreed. The idea of having to pay for non-cloud based software in perpetuity forever, and having it stop working the very second I discontinue paying is a hard no for me.
OP, go with the JetBrains model. You can still offer a monthly subscription, but also provide an annual option where you pay up front for a year. After that year, it reverts to a fallback license for the specific version that was current during that period. It’s a good approach.
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.
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.
Why not? Apple decides when a breaking change gets introduced, people on an older Intel Mac might get 5+ years of usage out of a Lifetime license for boringBar if they don't upgrade to macOS 27. It's the people that demand constant updates who should subsidize new versions being developed.
> Honestly anyone who'd over index [...] is doomed unless they learn about conversion rates
Converting those sales is OP's problem. People that don't buy SaaS products are principled and their stance won't change.
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.
> You could offer both a subscription and a one-off purchase.
Regardless of the presentation, $10 a year presumably represents what they want per user, per year, for this to be worth it for them. Don't rush to repackage that very conservative target into a 2nd format for people who won't pay $10 a year for a thing they'll use daily on a Mac in the first place.
> Offered only as a friendly suggestion and potential customer feedback.
And "please don't overindex on that comment OP" is offering an unreasonable response?
> And "please don't overindex on that comment OP" is offering an unreasonable response?
Not at all! Apologies if tone isn't coming through as I wanted. Good to have a contrarian view presented. Maybe a subscription really is what their particular market wants.
Subscription on something like this is goofy, and extra subscription per seat even for personal is goofier. For free, I can use Alfred/Raycast, Aerospace, and either sketchybar or zebar and have all this functionality executed even more skillfully and ergonomically. If you want to throw money into it, Alfred power pack is £34 and supports a great company with a lifetime purchase.
But I also understand I’m not the target audience for this, and some of my coworkers that wanted a Mac because “it’s a Mac” and now compare everything to Windows would probably use it. I’ll just have to feel bad for their wallets.
I always have an eerie felling when something like that has a dependency on 3rd party presence.
Q&A section doesn't explain what happens when the subscription is no longer active, but the app is still installed. What happens when the app manufacturer goes out of business? Does the app continue to work?
The subscription is a tell sign of an egoisticBar. A real boringBar wouldn't do that to its users.
OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app
It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later.
For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing.
A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about it. I still care a lot about long-term maintenance for an app like this, but I think this is a better balance.
Here's where this can be awful - I have a few pieces of software that are identical to this. After a few years I switch machines out and can't reactivate them and I'm SOL.
Put the $40 in the app store, I'll buy it just to support this move. (Though it should be $20.)
For business, I would also pay $20/seat in Apple Business's app store (no quantity discount needed), so it's part of our MDM software for Windows users unfamiliar with Mac. Note that subscriptions are not available to businesses using that channel, only flat purchases. All you have to do is have a flat purchase in the retail app store, and businesses can buy that in bulk to assign to users.
// Your other business licensing mechanisms, like, fixed number of users, different license per batch of users, etc., are too awkward for a real business with real employee turnover to keep track of, sorry.
Apps like these unfortunately cannot be put on the App Store as they use some Window Server shenanigans to make it work. boringBar is notarized by Apple and will work well with Gatekeeper if that makes it any better.
Regarding business licensing - I know I need to make changes to the fixed number of users limit. The change for it is there but I need some more testing before that gets pushed out.
Apart from that - why do you think the tiered pricing is bad? As you have more users the price per user goes down essentially to ~$1.5 per year at the highest tier.
alright man i'm gonna buy it you seem p cool. lovely looking software here too
edit: yeah this is good stuff. see some other bug reports here im actually not running into any myself, running 4 workspaces plenty of apps. its so straight forward and simple, the design is fantastic. seems to play nicely with my rectangle app snapping, though it takes a moment for it to resize since less bottom space is available with the bar but as long as i can snap im happy.
edit2: just tried ubar then ended up back on this. #1 reason is because your app will resize my window after i snap with rectangle. i couldn't get ubar to do that, ubar also felt a little more sluggish at times. ubar is more feature filled but something about the simplicity here is kind of exactly what i needed to replace the macos dock, and yours is hitting the mark really well.
i think few buttons (don't even need to be text menu items) for logout/restart/shutdown would be pretty clutch, but outside of that i do be digging this a lot. nice. enjoy my moneys!
Over the years, I've tried several of these dock replacement apps. The one that stuck the longest was uBar (which I used with a setup similar to what you have here, emulating a "windows taskbar".
I've hit issues with most of them that forced me to move back to the normal Dock, but the number one issue has always been around notification badges: they always seemed to break in strange ways.
For example, can your dock show badges for iMessage if the app isn't open? Does it get the updated badge count without me opening it? Say I receive a SMS/iMessage, does it instantly show a counter next to the unopened pinned messages app? None of the other apps successfully did this when I tried them...
I don't know if there are other apps like this, but iMessage was by far the biggest offender. Perhaps system settings too?
P.S.: Congrats on the launch :)
P.P.S.: As others have said, I think a subscription for this will rub many people the wrong way (I am one of them). If I'm paying for a subscription, I expect this to be pretty bug-free and have at least monthly updates. I wouldn't ask this of other subscription-based apps, but for one that replaces a system-level component and wants me to keep paying, you bet I am holding it to a high standard! I've wasted too much money on other replacements and gotten very little value out of that.
Hi there - I ran into the same issue myself, but sadly I still haven't found a way to show the badge count without opening the app. I'm still experimenting with it.
I expected some pushback on subscriptions, but after trying uBar and running into quite a few issues with it I wanted to build something that feels reliable and polished. I’m pretty much all-in on the Apple ecosystem now, even though I only switched ~6 months ago. My intention is to keep supporting boringBar regularly, as I use it every day myself.
Surely the regular Dock uses some hidden API. Could you try to trace it?
Having failed that, I'd look into trying to inspect (if possible, even we have to disable SIP) the dock itself. Have it do the work for us and read out its badges.
(Throwing random ideas out there, I'm sure you've thought of this)
Just spitballing here, but I know notifications are stored in a sqlite3 database. You might be able to query the count based on application type and use that?
I love that you've made this, but in a world of never ending subscriptions, a subscription to a taskbar is just not something I (or many I imagine) can justify - no matter how low the price.
We really have entered the age of everything being a subscription.
There are MORE apps that have a better reputation like sidebar , dock fix , active dock (has been around for years and years) , and a subscription does not make sense since most can be done for free like window previews with dock door , group windows by app is free in desktop and dock settings for Mission Control , the native dock can also do many things like notification badges, click to show desktop or use a hot corner or trackpad gesture , pin apps in the dock , there are a billion app launchers , spotlight is built in . Most people will stay away from subscriptions as I have observed in the comment below
(Pls be nice I’m new here and I don’t know how to comment properly )
OP here - much appreciated. Is there something that you didn't like about boringBar? Is there any missing feature you would like to see implemented or is it that it doesn't fit well with your current muscle memory with the system Dock?
One-time fee? I would be onboard instantly. Monthly fee? For what exactly? There is no recurring cost like server space or anything else. Nope, you lost me as a customer. For good.
I think businesses like this should rarely listen to customers asking for cheaper prices.
If your price is higher that’s fewer people you need to convince to pay. Fewer customers also means lower support burden.
Obviously it’s a balance, but I think customers asking for lower prices may just be an indicator that people actually like what you’re doing and want to buy it. That probably means someone else is going to just buy it without worrying about the price.
The lowest priced option isn’t always the most popular, either. The F-150 sells a lot better than the Nissan Versa.
Psychologically people can also perceive a low price as an indicator of low value and quality.
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?
It's just a matter of what one is used to. As someone who's used macOS since before OS X was released (alongside Windows and Linux), moving and resizing windows rarely poses issues.
I'm talking about the desktop environment explicitly, not the underlying OS.
To me, GNOME and Pantheon (elementaryOS DE) strongly resemble e.g. iPadOS or Android running on a tablet for a few reasons:
- Chunky heavily padded touch-optimized UI elements (even when no touch capability is present)
- By default, minimize button not present in titlebars
- Near total abandonment of menubars in favor of mobile-style "hamburger" menus
- By default, no desktop icons (not even an app grid!)
- Simplistic ecosystem apps with mobile-like philosophy of eschewing functionality that doesn't fit in toolbars and hamburger menus
- Little to no presence of progressive disclosure (enabling power user functions to be present without falling in the path of novices and tripping them up)
- Limited extensibility and scriptability (more so than macOS in some ways), with what exists (GNOME extensions) being fragile and breaking constantly due to needing to monkeypatch UI code
While it's not my cup of tea, KDE and even less trendy DEs like XFCE do a better job at acting like an actual desktop environment and surfacing the capabilities of the system.
Ah. Well then I'll argue my original statement holds. Op himself likened his product to gnome 2. Gnome 3 was released 15 years ago so if anything I was generous in my original comment.
Both have one-time/lifetime purchase options. Taskbar is $25 one-time with a free but expiring older version. ActiveDock's one-time prices are $15 (1 year of updates, but usable forever) and $60 (lifetime updates).
Thank you for mentioning my app (https://lawand.io/taskbar/). It's been around for a couple of years and it's considered the best alternative to uBar according to the extremely positive reviews by my users
Looks excellent but I can’t wrap my head around how this is a subscription. Pricing the app even at a higher range ($40-50), one—time payment makes way more sense.
You could even require paying for “upgrades” for major updates in the future. (Similar to that of Sketch or some apps made by Panic)
I'm with other people here. Make this a one-time purchase. If a major macOS update requires significant changes to keep the program working, make that a new version that people need to buy. A pretty standard way to keep people from feeling screwed if the break happens right after they bought your software is to give them the next version of your software for free if you release it within 1 year of their purchase.
I think you're actually likely to make more money that way because people will pass on adding yet another subscription to the pile they have already.
I've already used these apps and they did not serve my purpose well.
- I forced myself to use uBar but it has another level of jank that doesn't sit right with me - it is not reliable on a multi-monitor setup, there's no guarantee it'll work after waking up from sleep. If you maximize windows they will sit behind uBar sometimes - all of which boringBar does better and is more reliable at.
- Taskbar by Lawand is better than uBar but it has similar problems with multi-monitor support and wake from sleep. Apart from that their "start menu" app launcher is still in beta and you have to download a beta version from the developer's twitter page to actually use it. And obviously it's a subjective thing but the boringBar UI is a lot better - it integrates nicely with macOS.
I'm not the target market for a subscription for this, but I found it quite buggy - I had multiple browser windows open and couldn't navigate to more than one. I couldn't navigate to other spaces either (clicking on them did nothing) and scrolling through the apps menu was laggy.
> I built boringBar so I would not have to use the Dock
Does anybody really use the dock as a an app switcher? MacOS is built around shortcuts, alt-tab, show spaces, etc. The dock is there for starting apps – which you can also do via spotlight, and as a “favorites” list after you remove all the built-ins.
I personally use Raycast, which has a Switch Windows global hotkey (Opt + W) that brings up a list of all active windows and apps. From there, you can start typing part of the window title and hit Enter to bring the corresponding window to the foreground.
Slightly related but AltTab is also a nice window switcher with built-in thumbnail previews if you prefer being able to tab by "window" and not by "process" (aka more like Windows).
I see a lot of people treat the dock like the Windows taskbar. They have it filled with as many apps as they can fit in it and leave it on-screen. I used to use the dock like that when I first started using macOS. Now it lives off the left edge of the screen and spends most of the time hidden. I can open any app I need with Spotlight and Mission Control, CMD+Tab, and moving between virtual desktops lets me move around my currently open apps.
I've always setup my macbooks with a custom json config using https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/ to avoid the dock, but couldnt convince any friends to give it a try since its high effort, i guess
so i hacked together https://dockshortcut.com really quick and that kinda made the difference in how some people use their macbooks these days, but tough market, nobody likes paying for something that should come out of the box
you should probably reconsider asking for a subscription, people barely wanna pay once, even if it would save them weeks a year
Glad to see the pricing was adjusted! Something that would make this perfect for me would be autohide on the bar. I'm trying to keep static UI lements to a minimum on an oled display.
I know you’ve received plenty of feedback about the subscription being a dealbreaker. There would be no point in me adding that but I would say that I could see myself paying $50 for one version of this without upgrades. Maybe half price for upgrades if you have an existing license. So I probably wouldn’t necessarily mind paying $25 per year per se if it’s not a subscription. Like many other others here, I’m just not gonna go there.
Already got indexed by Brave Search's AI:
boringBar: A modern Dock replacement specifically for macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later that organizes windows by desktop, provides thumbnail previews, and includes unread notification badges. It requires a one-time $40 personal license after a 14-day free trial
Personally, I like the macOS dock so this wouldn't be for me. $10/year for a dock replacement is a bit much to ask for too, especially since this is a price per seat model. Maybe $15-20 as a one-time purchase per license? One of my favourite apps in the past few years is antinote and that is a one time fee of $5.
I’m totally a target audience here. I’ve been trying so many different app switcher applications. My latest favorite one is “flashspace”. I would love that kind of functionality be part of this too if possible. Regardless I’ll give it a shot for a few weeks and see if it works for me. Thanks for sharing!
Anyone who has watched Ubar constantly break across macOS updates will understand the point of a subscription fee. It’s non trivial to maintain and I doubt vibe coding is gonna help.
I'll be trying this! I used uBar for a long time, and more recently taskbar as uBar was too buggy to ignore. My main issue with Taskbar currently is that it sits over non windowed fullscreen apps (eg Steam games). Other than that I prefer the design on yours based on a quick look through the page.
Remember when we bought software, and owned the right to use it in perpetuity? Good times those were. Now fucking taskbars are SaaS. There is no end to rent-seeking behaviour. In a decade or two, I suppose we will not only be renting the right to use our computers, but also the mouse and keyboard will be time-gated rentals as well. Mousewheel and numpad only available on the Pro subscription, of course.
I‘d be happy to pay for an upgrade if future macOS changes break the functionality of this - cool - app, which would require the creator to update it. More work, which I would pay for. But not a subscription, sorry!
Plus, I‘d prefer to (but that’s impossible?) install via the App Store, to avoid a black box.
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.
Take a look to Jotego's (mister FPGA) business model. I was the main maintainer of a distro so I can say that That's not going to work. Also I'm in love with your style.
No , boring notch is a Dynamic Island like utility and it also hasn’t been updated since November , I suggest you to try out atoll which is a fork of it and pretty great .
having to click somewhere is not a shortcut, seriosly who the hell switches the desktops with mouse scrolling or clicking? there is a real shortcut for that
Wow, 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 it to succeed. Also, as someone who is deeply familiar with the platform and the third-party software ecosystem, my hope is that I can help communicate the things that would make if feel intuitively correct to a majority of Mac users. What I mean is that I'm a nerd who thinks a lot about the platform and the choices devs make that are nuanced and subtle. I hope you find it useful.
1. Practically invisible on a background that's dark / black. The photo on my desktop background is black at the bottom and this thing is therefore invisible. I don't know the best way to address that. Maybe it should sample the colors behind it and default to a light mode at first launch?
2. Frosted glass only changed one tab / chip (the active focus one) and the rest remained black and invisible. Not sure if that's deliberate or not. I expected the whole thing to change. I do see that window thumbnails are now frosted (didn't try thumbnails before toggling).
3. Needs kbd nav. I hovered to get thumbnails and tried arrow keys. No effect.
4. Thumbnail selections would benefit from a border or other visual indicator. Having only traffic light window controls to show which is active isn't sufficient.
5. As I continue to poke around, disabling frosted glass to view thumbnails in dark mode didn't change the glass background for thumbnails. Again, I didn't check thumbnails before switching frosted glass on. I don't know if that's supposed to work that way or not. Seems wrong to me, but I don't know the intent.
6. Delay for hover to invoke tooltips or thumbnails is too long. It feels sluggish. However, the snappy responsive drawing of new content when sliding from one app's thumbnails to another is very nice and impressive. It'd be easy for that to suck, so well done.
7. Time opening / drawing the app menu after first click is too long. I have a bajillion (394) apps installed, might be why. Should be as fast as clicking the Apple Menu regardless of how many apps need to be listed. Wait, now I just clicked it again to check if it is faster after the first time. Looks like the app cached whatever info it had to pull the first time cause it's properly snappy. Maybe pre-fetch that info on first launch so it isn't slow on the first click.
8. The thumbnails for minimized browser windows are awesome! Much nicer than using the thumbnails from Dock windows / tiles. I like that so much that I would consider working this into my workflow despite not needing it otherwise. I probably wouldn't do so, but I like it a lot.
9. The desktop / spaces switcher should probably also have thumbnails showing the content of each space.
10. There should be a toggle that closes a window from the thumbnails. I see that right-click has an option to do so, but there should be a left-clickable toggle in one of the corners. I'm gonna go against typical MacOS idioms and recommend experimenting with putting that toggle at the bottom of the thumbnail because they're so tall relative to the taskbar height. It might be wrong when you test it out. It's one of those things that I think either it feels right or it doesn't. My first instinct, however, is that it ought to be in the upper-left corner.
At the end of the day, I like it. I'm not the target audience, as mentioned above. But I know there are a lots of people who are the intended audience and I want them to have nice tools. I hope this makes some people happy. I'd be happy to provide additional feedback on a future build if the above is considered useful. Email in profile. Fingers crossed this doesn't come off as critical of the app. I like honest and direct feedback and I hope I haven't bummed you out cause that's not at all the intent.
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 please let me know how this could work better?
5. Right now the Tahoe glass/frosted switch only works on the bar. A glass revamp is in the works for people who like the Liquid Glass design language.
6. I faced the opposite issue to this during my testing - the thumbnails opened up fairly quickly in my case. I'll take note of it and will fix it in later versions.
7. Correct - first time is slower because of the excessively large number of apps. I'll try to reproduce this.
9. Good idea. Will implement this as well.
10. If you hover on the thumbnail window the close and minimize buttons will show up. Are you talking about the ability to quit the app and all of its windows entirely?
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.
I can second the issue with the automatic color selection; with my background photo it cashes out to an illegible black on black, and there's no (obvious) option to change the theme or override the computed colors.
It seems like it would be relatively straightforward to honor the user's light mode/dark mode setting, and the WCAG accessibility guidelines [1] do a good job of both discussing the importance of luminance contrast to legibility, and providing resources and advice toward programmatically selecting text vs. background colors to ensure everything stays readable.
(I did go ahead and purchase a subscription, since I was one of the people who asked for the option. I'll keep an eye out over the coming weeks for updates! Considering the immediate and extensive interest in boringBar that's been very much evident today, I'm really looking forward to seeing where development goes on this. Congratulations on your successful Show HN!)
Hey. I'm seeing this issue with some other users as well and I'm trying to reproduce this - do you have the reduce transparency accessibility option enabled by any chance?
Show me a side-dockable vertical taskbar, circa Win XP thru 7 style - and a lifetime license for 10 years' worth of the subscription, which you may no longer even support by then - and you will have closed a sale.
- I see, I can work on adding folders to the dock, sure.
- Fair. I think the clickable area is too small, right? I think I had the same issue as well but I got used to it. Nevertheless I'll push an update to fix this in some time.
- I'll experiment with a few toned down versions of the active window chip.
I 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 long.
Since this is the top comment as of now - hijacking this to introduce a change to pricing:
------
OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app
It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later.
For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing.
A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about it. I still care a lot about long-term maintenance for an app like this, but I think this is a better balance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743992
Awesome that you were receptive to feedback. I hope most of the people who commented find out and don't just memory-hole the project.
What was your justification for the monthly fee in the first place?
There is a model that worked for decades: If you spent a _significant_ amount of work enhancing an existing tool you'd release a new major version. The would be a discount for license holders of the old version. Why reinvent the world over and over again?
Simple answer right? It makes more money.
Not saying that was OPs motivation but that's obviously why the shift happened.
To me it seems like small businesses like this get squeezed by these demands to make everything cheaper while the big corporations ignore it and stick to their pricing.
I’m not sure OP should have capitulated. Someone who loves this tool will probably gladly pay more.
The question is what is the proportion of people loving it vs liking it.
The proportion gets a lot easier to deal with as the price goes up.
Is it easier to convince one person to pay $100 or 100 people to pay $1?
I personally prefer the monthly payments of a nominal amount where $2-8/month is my usual small app tolerance. It feels like I’m supporting the development of useful tools while having the option to discontinue my patronage when the tool is no longer relevant or useful to my workflow. This gives products a natural lifespan and aligns the developer incentives to keep the product functional and continue developing new features.
Old guard will say what they will about software licensing but at the end of the day it’s all the same.
I get it now that folks absolutely loathe the idea of subscriptions - that too for a taskbar. In hindsight I too find it hideous but I wanted the pricing to reflect the effort that went into this - wrestling with the Window Server and Xcode for multiple weekends over the past months.
But hey, the masses have spoken - and a perpetual license it is. Vox populi, vox dei.
Given how many developers here use LLMs daily, how do you think about defensibility? Tools like this seem relatively easy to reverse-engineer and replicate with enough time and LLM assistance. Did that influence your decision to charge a subscription or the change to a personal license?
That's the reason why I added a subscription in the first place - you would pay a dirt-cheap price for a "boring" product with an added insurance that someone will be there to support it.
People will replicate it, sure, but supporting it regularly is another thing. I guess the majority wanted a perpetual license - so it's a win for the masses.
I cannot agree with you more.
Personally, I dare not replace the Dock with Windows-style task bar for fear that my OLED display might have burn-in on it. Yet, when I need an alternative, I would rather make an APP for my own.
>> how do you think about defensibility?
defensibility nowadays is app support and development. the more work you pour into it the more defensible it will be.
I personally would gladly pay to have app constantly polished and improved. What I would not use is some vibe-coded alternative that was slopped with AI in a day and pushed to github with a tweet "i made a free X alternative" and then abandoned.
how much is there to improve and polish for a taskbar? at most it will be keeping up with macOS throwing breaking changes at you and maybe one or the other weird bug.
but isn't that it?
I would not.
I'm not paying $40 for a taskbar replacement. And not for two years of updates and a two device limit on top.
Maybe if it was $10, I could consider it. Prices for macOS apps are insane in my opinion. Everyone wants to charge yearly or every two years now too.
They’re not insane.
It costs $99 a year just to be able to write Mac apps at all.
Any sort of buy-once app on macOS is unsustainable to the developer. They are paying Apple $99 a year forever.
If you want cheap/free apps get off of Apple’s ecosystem and switch to Linux.
I second this! As a lite Mac user, $40 is a bit steep. I'll manage without boringBar no matter how great it is.
Honestly, I have tried to really cut down on my usage of 3rd-party dependencies when possible. In a way, it's kind of freeing. Whatever I still need, I write myself. If I cannot write it, then I try to find something FOSS. If I find nothing, then I consider purchasing something.
For example, I am rolling my own window manager (that needs some much needed TLC). I ditched Alfred for Spotlight. Though Alfred is better, I will survive just fine. And the list goes on.
I am not trying to take a dig at the OP. I am sure he or she put effort into this application. But I am genuinely curious -- does anybody actually need this software? Cmd+Tab, a decent window manager, and Spotlight would solve the same problems for free.
Feedback from a potential customer: I despise 2-device limits. I used DEVONthink for a decade but dropped it because of that exact thing.
At home, I have a Mac Studio[0] set up in my office with my music stuff, and I'm writing this on my MacBoor Air[1] here on my lap in the living room. I also have a work laptop, although it's safely tucked away in my backback right now. My wife has an MBA, too, but that's hers and I don't mess with it. So I'm elbow-deep in Macs that are used solely by me, and I bounce between them regularly.
The 2-device limit is a dealbreaker for me. It's where I stop reading. I don't care if it cures cancer: I won't buy an app that makes me pick and choose which of the devices in my care I can use it on. I'm sympathetic to why vendors pick that limit. I get that you don't want me to buy a single license and spread it around my friends and work circles. That's completely reasonable and understandable. And yet, it completely breaks my use case. I bet I'm far from alone in this.
[0]A previous job let me keep it when I left.
[1]I bought to hack on personal projects instead of using [0], which was work-owned at the time.
You can purchase multiple licenses. If you can afford a dozen computers, you can afford a couple more licenses.
Very true! Completely irrelant here, because I only purchased one of those computers as you correctly noted, but true!
What's the alternative?
Trust and respect, which is a 2-way street. I've bought some relatively expensive apps (the pro version of nearly everything Omni Group makes, Things, etc. etc. etc.) and all of them let you install and use the apps on all of your computers. They're licensed per person, not per device. I despise technical controls on this for the same reason I despise DRM on physical media: it's an inconvenience to rightful owners and a temporary speed bump to pirates.
I'm not about to abuse my OmniFocus licenses, even though I could. They sold me a great product at a reasonable price, with permission to throw a copy on everything I own so I can use it no matter which chair I'm sitting at. They trust and respect me, and I trust and respect them.
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 anyway.
I also think a low-cost subscription sets a clearer expectation that the app will continue to be maintained and kept working as macOS changes. For software like this, where OS updates can easily break things, that felt like the more honest model.
Adding on to this, apps that hook into window management and multi-monitor behavior can break in subtle ways over time. I ran into some of that with uBar on my setup, especially around multi-monitor use and waking from sleep, and I wanted boringBar’s pricing to match the expectation of continued support and fixes.
I 100% understand why you are using a subscription-based model. It makes sense, and I agree it's the most honest model given that you have to continually support it and you don't want to have to either over-promise on extended support, and offer refunds if you can't fulfill that promise.
I just hate managing subscriptions.
If you gave me the option to require manual subscription renewal, rather than auto-renewal, I would 100% buy this right now. Basically allow me to purchase for 1 year then click a button to confirm that I'm still getting value out of the product. If I don't click that button then you should assume I'm no longer interested and cancel my subscription.
(I don't like using my mac but sometimes I have to use it for work, and I wish I had this.)
I've added a perpetual license - $40 for 2 devices and 2 years of updates.
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 12/y or 80 lifetime last I checked.
You get guaranteed revenue, and you get it upfront - better for cashflow. And you can always tell customers “if you don’t like subs buy the lifetime option”.
> 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
GoodSync's pricing is notable: $20/year for five devices, but stackable. I've signed up for 10+ years. GoodSync needs central infrastructure to work, so the ongoing pricing makes sense.
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.
That’s an economic concept, not a dig at consumers. It’s well known (hell, there’s a nobel laureate for it) that humans are irrational when it comes to economics.
Was the thesis of the fake Nobel recipient that consumers are irrational specifically because they prefer one-time purchases to subscriptions? Otherwise I'm not really sure what the relevance of bringing it up in this very specific context it.
Thank you for replying. I understand your perspective — the subscription is a signal that you will maintain the app long-term, and to provide the revenue for it. Also, it looks cheap. A few counter-points, while we’re talking:
> For an app like this, I think that’s a reasonable price.
Except that it’s not a price, it’s an access fee, and those are very different. If it were a price I’d have the thing I paid for — a binary to use as a like. Instead what I have is a token that you can revoke at any time for any reason, including you getting hit by a car or getting bored with the app.
> a low-cost subscription sets a clearer expectation that the app will continue to be maintained …
Forgive the bluntness, but it does no such thing. This app just launched. No one has reason to believe the little business behind it will still exist in 12 months. Death rate for products like this is very high. A subscription from me is a bet that you will still be around in a year, and you have zero track record.
Alright - that's fair.
I've taken the feedback here and added a perpetual personal license for 2 devices at $40 - it includes 2 years of updates and the app will keep on working after that.
I don't think anyone is trying to have you get rid of the subscription option in order to have the non-subscription option. Same with defendending the good value - whether it's subscription or not is orthogonal with whether it's priced reasonably.
Low cost subscriptions as the only options can also give multiple vibes, not just one intended one, as well. The one you highighlight is somewhat optimistic takeaway "the publisher is fair with this price and I only need to pay for however much I actually use - what a great guarantee this will be good for the long run".
Another valid takeaway is basically the opposite "It's not clear if the publisher is committed to this software. The only payment option they think they can sell is for just $10 and are only showing commitment in being around for up to just 1 year - are they really confident in the product or value"? Even more doubtful are those suspicious of new dealings "It's fair enough now but do I really want to get used to it for a year and then the price is jacked up by renewal?" (this can be solved with more than a non-subscription option too. E.g. longer term subscriptions, only if you truly are trying to advertise "years of support to come" can help provide the feeling of commitment).
Even in the case one wants to start/stick with the subscription having a lifetime and/or versioned option only adds more to all of the things you listed as reasons for offering a subscription alone. E.g. seeing that "lifetime is equal to at least x years" or "y year term subscription" and then the user going with the 1 year subscription is strictly better signaling to them than just having a 1 year subscription.
The only thing suspicious from your comment is the current subscription option is 1 year, the ask was for longer/perpetual options, and the justification given was the price per month seems great. Other than the absolute value of the price per month is lower and sounds easier to defend, there doesn't seem to be anything about your product, the subscription for it, or the context made the cost per month the relevant interval for a user to consider the value.
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.
The target audience for any product for sale are people who are willing to pay.
Not people who are outraged by that concept.
It's a tiny market. Why would they bother if only 10 people will give them $10?
I have the same bias as the parent. I'd rather pay $50 one time than $9 a year even if I throw it away after 4 years.
But the main reason I wouldn't install it despite being happy customizing linux is that it's yet another black box I need to trust and that knows way too much. It's really insane how much you need to compromise your security on macos to have a decent developer experience.
It's not economical. Lifetime sales for a lifetime unlock would probably be under $100. So not worth it for the developer.
Apparently not that tiny, if a competitor has the same product priced at $30 and is currently on to version 4 after 12+ years in business!
They can set whatever price they want. And in business... for a micro saas? Is that just... waiting?
While 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 run, in which case you pay an upgrade fee to buy the next major version - or maybe the next major version has new features you might want to upgrade to as well.
My old Macs are stuck on 10.13, and I see Ubar mentioned elsewhere in this thread and that it's still compatible with 10.13. I might consider the $30 one off price to buy Ubar and keep it forever, but I wouldn't do a $10 subscription.
Agreed. The idea of having to pay for non-cloud based software in perpetuity forever, and having it stop working the very second I discontinue paying is a hard no for me.
OP, go with the JetBrains model. You can still offer a monthly subscription, but also provide an annual option where you pay up front for a year. After that year, it reverts to a fallback license for the specific version that was current during that period. It’s a good approach.
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.
Why not? Apple decides when a breaking change gets introduced, people on an older Intel Mac might get 5+ years of usage out of a Lifetime license for boringBar if they don't upgrade to macOS 27. It's the people that demand constant updates who should subsidize new versions being developed.
> Honestly anyone who'd over index [...] is doomed unless they learn about conversion rates
Converting those sales is OP's problem. People that don't buy SaaS products are principled and their stance won't change.
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.
> You could offer both a subscription and a one-off purchase.
Regardless of the presentation, $10 a year presumably represents what they want per user, per year, for this to be worth it for them. Don't rush to repackage that very conservative target into a 2nd format for people who won't pay $10 a year for a thing they'll use daily on a Mac in the first place.
> Offered only as a friendly suggestion and potential customer feedback.
And "please don't overindex on that comment OP" is offering an unreasonable response?
> And "please don't overindex on that comment OP" is offering an unreasonable response?
Not at all! Apologies if tone isn't coming through as I wanted. Good to have a contrarian view presented. Maybe a subscription really is what their particular market wants.
This reminds me of when I got my Vaxx subscription after the 5th booster.
Subscription on something like this is goofy, and extra subscription per seat even for personal is goofier. For free, I can use Alfred/Raycast, Aerospace, and either sketchybar or zebar and have all this functionality executed even more skillfully and ergonomically. If you want to throw money into it, Alfred power pack is £34 and supports a great company with a lifetime purchase.
But I also understand I’m not the target audience for this, and some of my coworkers that wanted a Mac because “it’s a Mac” and now compare everything to Windows would probably use it. I’ll just have to feel bad for their wallets.
I always have an eerie felling when something like that has a dependency on 3rd party presence.
Q&A section doesn't explain what happens when the subscription is no longer active, but the app is still installed. What happens when the app manufacturer goes out of business? Does the app continue to work?
The subscription is a tell sign of an egoisticBar. A real boringBar wouldn't do that to its users.
OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app
It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later.
For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing.
A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about it. I still care a lot about long-term maintenance for an app like this, but I think this is a better balance.
Here's where this can be awful - I have a few pieces of software that are identical to this. After a few years I switch machines out and can't reactivate them and I'm SOL.
Put the $40 in the app store, I'll buy it just to support this move. (Though it should be $20.)
For business, I would also pay $20/seat in Apple Business's app store (no quantity discount needed), so it's part of our MDM software for Windows users unfamiliar with Mac. Note that subscriptions are not available to businesses using that channel, only flat purchases. All you have to do is have a flat purchase in the retail app store, and businesses can buy that in bulk to assign to users.
// Your other business licensing mechanisms, like, fixed number of users, different license per batch of users, etc., are too awkward for a real business with real employee turnover to keep track of, sorry.
Apps like these unfortunately cannot be put on the App Store as they use some Window Server shenanigans to make it work. boringBar is notarized by Apple and will work well with Gatekeeper if that makes it any better.
Regarding business licensing - I know I need to make changes to the fixed number of users limit. The change for it is there but I need some more testing before that gets pushed out.
Apart from that - why do you think the tiered pricing is bad? As you have more users the price per user goes down essentially to ~$1.5 per year at the highest tier.
alright man i'm gonna buy it you seem p cool. lovely looking software here too
edit: yeah this is good stuff. see some other bug reports here im actually not running into any myself, running 4 workspaces plenty of apps. its so straight forward and simple, the design is fantastic. seems to play nicely with my rectangle app snapping, though it takes a moment for it to resize since less bottom space is available with the bar but as long as i can snap im happy.
edit2: just tried ubar then ended up back on this. #1 reason is because your app will resize my window after i snap with rectangle. i couldn't get ubar to do that, ubar also felt a little more sluggish at times. ubar is more feature filled but something about the simplicity here is kind of exactly what i needed to replace the macos dock, and yours is hitting the mark really well.
i think few buttons (don't even need to be text menu items) for logout/restart/shutdown would be pretty clutch, but outside of that i do be digging this a lot. nice. enjoy my moneys!
Thanks for actually using the app. Appreciate it! I concur with the uBar issue - its jank was the main reason I built this app.
I didn't want to add the logout/restart/shutdown option initially, but I'll experiment with it to see how useful it is.
Doesn't this make Personal licences about 6x the cost of Business licences?
Hi!
Over the years, I've tried several of these dock replacement apps. The one that stuck the longest was uBar (which I used with a setup similar to what you have here, emulating a "windows taskbar".
I've hit issues with most of them that forced me to move back to the normal Dock, but the number one issue has always been around notification badges: they always seemed to break in strange ways.
For example, can your dock show badges for iMessage if the app isn't open? Does it get the updated badge count without me opening it? Say I receive a SMS/iMessage, does it instantly show a counter next to the unopened pinned messages app? None of the other apps successfully did this when I tried them...
I don't know if there are other apps like this, but iMessage was by far the biggest offender. Perhaps system settings too?
P.S.: Congrats on the launch :)
P.P.S.: As others have said, I think a subscription for this will rub many people the wrong way (I am one of them). If I'm paying for a subscription, I expect this to be pretty bug-free and have at least monthly updates. I wouldn't ask this of other subscription-based apps, but for one that replaces a system-level component and wants me to keep paying, you bet I am holding it to a high standard! I've wasted too much money on other replacements and gotten very little value out of that.
Hi there - I ran into the same issue myself, but sadly I still haven't found a way to show the badge count without opening the app. I'm still experimenting with it.
I expected some pushback on subscriptions, but after trying uBar and running into quite a few issues with it I wanted to build something that feels reliable and polished. I’m pretty much all-in on the Apple ecosystem now, even though I only switched ~6 months ago. My intention is to keep supporting boringBar regularly, as I use it every day myself.
Surely the regular Dock uses some hidden API. Could you try to trace it?
Having failed that, I'd look into trying to inspect (if possible, even we have to disable SIP) the dock itself. Have it do the work for us and read out its badges.
(Throwing random ideas out there, I'm sure you've thought of this)
Just spitballing here, but I know notifications are stored in a sqlite3 database. You might be able to query the count based on application type and use that?
Are they? I'm not so sure. If they are you could set a watcher on it to receive filesystem notifications when it changes.
I think you can get the info from LaunchServices using `lsappinfo` command.
I love that you've made this, but in a world of never ending subscriptions, a subscription to a taskbar is just not something I (or many I imagine) can justify - no matter how low the price.
We really have entered the age of everything being a subscription.
There are MORE apps that have a better reputation like sidebar , dock fix , active dock (has been around for years and years) , and a subscription does not make sense since most can be done for free like window previews with dock door , group windows by app is free in desktop and dock settings for Mission Control , the native dock can also do many things like notification badges, click to show desktop or use a hot corner or trackpad gesture , pin apps in the dock , there are a billion app launchers , spotlight is built in . Most people will stay away from subscriptions as I have observed in the comment below (Pls be nice I’m new here and I don’t know how to comment properly )
I would pay $10 one time for this; a subscription seems excessive to me.
100%. A subscription is instant death for this.
The good news is someone definitely will (or perhaps already has) done this without one.
I appreciate a good UX improvement, and I respectfully appreciate you building this for your own use case.
But Dawg? Really!
I'm not sure this is for me, but I wanted to say I Appreciate the little design touches and thought that is on display in this app. Great work!
OP here - much appreciated. Is there something that you didn't like about boringBar? Is there any missing feature you would like to see implemented or is it that it doesn't fit well with your current muscle memory with the system Dock?
One-time fee? I would be onboard instantly. Monthly fee? For what exactly? There is no recurring cost like server space or anything else. Nope, you lost me as a customer. For good.
IMO, this isn't priced competitively: * Mbar can be had for $15 on stacksocial * Sidebar is $21 w/ lifetime updates * DockDoor is free and OSS
I think businesses like this should rarely listen to customers asking for cheaper prices.
If your price is higher that’s fewer people you need to convince to pay. Fewer customers also means lower support burden.
Obviously it’s a balance, but I think customers asking for lower prices may just be an indicator that people actually like what you’re doing and want to buy it. That probably means someone else is going to just buy it without worrying about the price.
The lowest priced option isn’t always the most popular, either. The F-150 sells a lot better than the Nissan Versa.
Psychologically people can also perceive a low price as an indicator of low value and quality.
Ah, good old Apple, where for only $9.99 a month, you can experience what Linux offered for free 15+ years ago.
as long as we're quipping, free software is free so long as you don't value your time
It takes me longer to login to PayPal than it takes to install Dash-to-Panel: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/
Maybe that's just what $10 worth of labor looks like in today's economy, though. Times are tough.
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?
It's just a matter of what one is used to. As someone who's used macOS since before OS X was released (alongside Windows and Linux), moving and resizing windows rarely poses issues.
Can you expand a bit on what you mean by "Superpowered tablet os"?
I'm tend to think of it as a server os with a DE, but as a backend developer I'm probably biased.
I'm talking about the desktop environment explicitly, not the underlying OS.
To me, GNOME and Pantheon (elementaryOS DE) strongly resemble e.g. iPadOS or Android running on a tablet for a few reasons:
- Chunky heavily padded touch-optimized UI elements (even when no touch capability is present)
- By default, minimize button not present in titlebars
- Near total abandonment of menubars in favor of mobile-style "hamburger" menus
- By default, no desktop icons (not even an app grid!)
- Simplistic ecosystem apps with mobile-like philosophy of eschewing functionality that doesn't fit in toolbars and hamburger menus
- Little to no presence of progressive disclosure (enabling power user functions to be present without falling in the path of novices and tripping them up)
- Limited extensibility and scriptability (more so than macOS in some ways), with what exists (GNOME extensions) being fragile and breaking constantly due to needing to monkeypatch UI code
While it's not my cup of tea, KDE and even less trendy DEs like XFCE do a better job at acting like an actual desktop environment and surfacing the capabilities of the system.
Ah. Well then I'll argue my original statement holds. Op himself likened his product to gnome 2. Gnome 3 was released 15 years ago so if anything I was generous in my original comment.
Gnome is a pretty big exception lol. Considering it's the dominant DE.
Also tablet OS? Gnome is keyboard driven with tiling features OOTB...
See my answer to the other comment[0].
Being keyboard-driven is nice but doesn't make up for these things, and these days macOS comes with Aero-Snap-like tiling built in too.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743939
I use uBar for this: https://ubarapp.com but this looks like a nice lightweight alternative!
https://lawand.io/taskbar/ as well
and https://noteifyapp.com/activedock/, which is less extreme but has a start menu-like launcher option
Both have one-time/lifetime purchase options. Taskbar is $25 one-time with a free but expiring older version. ActiveDock's one-time prices are $15 (1 year of updates, but usable forever) and $60 (lifetime updates).
Thank you for mentioning my app (https://lawand.io/taskbar/). It's been around for a couple of years and it's considered the best alternative to uBar according to the extremely positive reviews by my users
Another alternative is https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/ ($10 upfront) really well done.
uBar looks amazing as well, and it’s not a subscription, I really like boringBar but can’t justify a subscription tho
Both are under 10MB, So I don't think there would be much difference.
I meant more in terms of featureset. uBar has a lot of features and it takes a while to get a setup that works well.
Once it's set up, though, it's pretty rock solid.
Looks excellent but I can’t wrap my head around how this is a subscription. Pricing the app even at a higher range ($40-50), one—time payment makes way more sense.
You could even require paying for “upgrades” for major updates in the future. (Similar to that of Sketch or some apps made by Panic)
Don't take it personally OP, but taskbar-as-a-service is objectively one of the funniest things I have ever seen posted on this site.
+1 to amplify the voice that hates a subscription to a taskbar. If it was €15 one time I would’ve instantly bought it.
Of coarse its a subscription...
I'm with other people here. Make this a one-time purchase. If a major macOS update requires significant changes to keep the program working, make that a new version that people need to buy. A pretty standard way to keep people from feeling screwed if the break happens right after they bought your software is to give them the next version of your software for free if you release it within 1 year of their purchase.
I think you're actually likely to make more money that way because people will pass on adding yet another subscription to the pile they have already.
Cant see how this app would fit into a subscription.
Looks great but even $40 for a perpetual license with only two years of updates still seems excessive.
Taskbar, Uber, etc. cost less and have unlimited updates. How is this better?
I've already used these apps and they did not serve my purpose well.
- I forced myself to use uBar but it has another level of jank that doesn't sit right with me - it is not reliable on a multi-monitor setup, there's no guarantee it'll work after waking up from sleep. If you maximize windows they will sit behind uBar sometimes - all of which boringBar does better and is more reliable at.
- Taskbar by Lawand is better than uBar but it has similar problems with multi-monitor support and wake from sleep. Apart from that their "start menu" app launcher is still in beta and you have to download a beta version from the developer's twitter page to actually use it. And obviously it's a subjective thing but the boringBar UI is a lot better - it integrates nicely with macOS.
Amazing! I've been testing for the last hours
Hey - thanks for testing it out. Have you found any issues as of yet that I need to look into?
I'm not the target market for a subscription for this, but I found it quite buggy - I had multiple browser windows open and couldn't navigate to more than one. I couldn't navigate to other spaces either (clicking on them did nothing) and scrolling through the apps menu was laggy.
The screenshots on the website look nice though.
> I built boringBar so I would not have to use the Dock
Does anybody really use the dock as a an app switcher? MacOS is built around shortcuts, alt-tab, show spaces, etc. The dock is there for starting apps – which you can also do via spotlight, and as a “favorites” list after you remove all the built-ins.
I personally use Raycast, which has a Switch Windows global hotkey (Opt + W) that brings up a list of all active windows and apps. From there, you can start typing part of the window title and hit Enter to bring the corresponding window to the foreground.
Slightly related but AltTab is also a nice window switcher with built-in thumbnail previews if you prefer being able to tab by "window" and not by "process" (aka more like Windows).
https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos
I see a lot of people treat the dock like the Windows taskbar. They have it filled with as many apps as they can fit in it and leave it on-screen. I used to use the dock like that when I first started using macOS. Now it lives off the left edge of the screen and spends most of the time hidden. I can open any app I need with Spotlight and Mission Control, CMD+Tab, and moving between virtual desktops lets me move around my currently open apps.
I've always setup my macbooks with a custom json config using https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/ to avoid the dock, but couldnt convince any friends to give it a try since its high effort, i guess
so i hacked together https://dockshortcut.com really quick and that kinda made the difference in how some people use their macbooks these days, but tough market, nobody likes paying for something that should come out of the box
you should probably reconsider asking for a subscription, people barely wanna pay once, even if it would save them weeks a year
Glad to see the pricing was adjusted! Something that would make this perfect for me would be autohide on the bar. I'm trying to keep static UI lements to a minimum on an oled display.
I am trying it but the colors don't seem correct. I cannot read the title of any other tab except currently selected one: https://imgur.com/a/t0BDxuC
PS: How to contact developer? I cannot find email.
Neat idea!
Okay this is most definitely a bug. Have you enabled reduce transparency in macOS settings by any chance?
I know you’ve received plenty of feedback about the subscription being a dealbreaker. There would be no point in me adding that but I would say that I could see myself paying $50 for one version of this without upgrades. Maybe half price for upgrades if you have an existing license. So I probably wouldn’t necessarily mind paying $25 per year per se if it’s not a subscription. Like many other others here, I’m just not gonna go there.
Good luck!
This would be perfect for me if it docked to the side in a vertical orientation, like Firefox tabs, or Windows XP.
Why is the personal licence $20/yr and the business licence $3.49/yr? Unless I'm misreading the pricing here.
Already got indexed by Brave Search's AI: boringBar: A modern Dock replacement specifically for macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later that organizes windows by desktop, provides thumbnail previews, and includes unread notification badges. It requires a one-time $40 personal license after a 14-day free trial
This looks really nice!
I really like this panel, do you have a linux version config or dot files that is similar looking?
Personally, I like the macOS dock so this wouldn't be for me. $10/year for a dock replacement is a bit much to ask for too, especially since this is a price per seat model. Maybe $15-20 as a one-time purchase per license? One of my favourite apps in the past few years is antinote and that is a one time fee of $5.
I’m totally a target audience here. I’ve been trying so many different app switcher applications. My latest favorite one is “flashspace”. I would love that kind of functionality be part of this too if possible. Regardless I’ll give it a shot for a few weeks and see if it works for me. Thanks for sharing!
Anyone who has watched Ubar constantly break across macOS updates will understand the point of a subscription fee. It’s non trivial to maintain and I doubt vibe coding is gonna help.
I'll be trying this! I used uBar for a long time, and more recently taskbar as uBar was too buggy to ignore. My main issue with Taskbar currently is that it sits over non windowed fullscreen apps (eg Steam games). Other than that I prefer the design on yours based on a quick look through the page.
Remember when we bought software, and owned the right to use it in perpetuity? Good times those were. Now fucking taskbars are SaaS. There is no end to rent-seeking behaviour. In a decade or two, I suppose we will not only be renting the right to use our computers, but also the mouse and keyboard will be time-gated rentals as well. Mousewheel and numpad only available on the Pro subscription, of course.
They're milking the final drops, before LLMs become so good that they'll write something like this in an hour
I‘d be happy to pay for an upgrade if future macOS changes break the functionality of this - cool - app, which would require the creator to update it. More work, which I would pay for. But not a subscription, sorry!
Plus, I‘d prefer to (but that’s impossible?) install via the App Store, to avoid a black box.
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.
Take a look to Jotego's (mister FPGA) business model. I was the main maintainer of a distro so I can say that That's not going to work. Also I'm in love with your style.
I am using BoringNotch, which is great. Is this somehow related?
No , boring notch is a Dynamic Island like utility and it also hasn’t been updated since November , I suggest you to try out atoll which is a fork of it and pretty great .
I can’t find it now, but there was a Start Menu/Taskbar for Mac OS 9 era Mac’s as well. It was bizarre.
Why does it need to talk to facebook.com, ntp.org, aws.com, cloudflare.com, google.com, and windows.com?
These are NTP servers for checking time via the app. I'll fix this in an update today - it shouldn't be required in the trial version.
it looks great, looks clean, seems like people want it.
nobody's paying a subscription for a taskbar. The business model here is a one time sale.
Forced subscription = immediate uninstall; would have gladly paid a decent one-time fee for the app.
Fantastic work, but ubar is going to eat your lunch with that subscription
It looks really good, what makes this different from uBar?
having to click somewhere is not a shortcut, seriosly who the hell switches the desktops with mouse scrolling or clicking? there is a real shortcut for that
Just adding to the pile to say that the subscription kills it for me.
Subscription ? Big No
Is there some more expensive tiers to change the color or do I need to pay a premium?
im not spending 40 fucking dollars on a task bar
Wow, 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 it to succeed. Also, as someone who is deeply familiar with the platform and the third-party software ecosystem, my hope is that I can help communicate the things that would make if feel intuitively correct to a majority of Mac users. What I mean is that I'm a nerd who thinks a lot about the platform and the choices devs make that are nuanced and subtle. I hope you find it useful.
1. Practically invisible on a background that's dark / black. The photo on my desktop background is black at the bottom and this thing is therefore invisible. I don't know the best way to address that. Maybe it should sample the colors behind it and default to a light mode at first launch?
2. Frosted glass only changed one tab / chip (the active focus one) and the rest remained black and invisible. Not sure if that's deliberate or not. I expected the whole thing to change. I do see that window thumbnails are now frosted (didn't try thumbnails before toggling).
3. Needs kbd nav. I hovered to get thumbnails and tried arrow keys. No effect.
4. Thumbnail selections would benefit from a border or other visual indicator. Having only traffic light window controls to show which is active isn't sufficient.
5. As I continue to poke around, disabling frosted glass to view thumbnails in dark mode didn't change the glass background for thumbnails. Again, I didn't check thumbnails before switching frosted glass on. I don't know if that's supposed to work that way or not. Seems wrong to me, but I don't know the intent.
6. Delay for hover to invoke tooltips or thumbnails is too long. It feels sluggish. However, the snappy responsive drawing of new content when sliding from one app's thumbnails to another is very nice and impressive. It'd be easy for that to suck, so well done.
7. Time opening / drawing the app menu after first click is too long. I have a bajillion (394) apps installed, might be why. Should be as fast as clicking the Apple Menu regardless of how many apps need to be listed. Wait, now I just clicked it again to check if it is faster after the first time. Looks like the app cached whatever info it had to pull the first time cause it's properly snappy. Maybe pre-fetch that info on first launch so it isn't slow on the first click.
8. The thumbnails for minimized browser windows are awesome! Much nicer than using the thumbnails from Dock windows / tiles. I like that so much that I would consider working this into my workflow despite not needing it otherwise. I probably wouldn't do so, but I like it a lot.
9. The desktop / spaces switcher should probably also have thumbnails showing the content of each space.
10. There should be a toggle that closes a window from the thumbnails. I see that right-click has an option to do so, but there should be a left-clickable toggle in one of the corners. I'm gonna go against typical MacOS idioms and recommend experimenting with putting that toggle at the bottom of the thumbnail because they're so tall relative to the taskbar height. It might be wrong when you test it out. It's one of those things that I think either it feels right or it doesn't. My first instinct, however, is that it ought to be in the upper-left corner.
At the end of the day, I like it. I'm not the target audience, as mentioned above. But I know there are a lots of people who are the intended audience and I want them to have nice tools. I hope this makes some people happy. I'd be happy to provide additional feedback on a future build if the above is considered useful. Email in profile. Fingers crossed this doesn't come off as critical of the app. I like honest and direct feedback and I hope I haven't bummed you out cause that's not at all the intent.
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 please let me know how this could work better?
5. Right now the Tahoe glass/frosted switch only works on the bar. A glass revamp is in the works for people who like the Liquid Glass design language.
6. I faced the opposite issue to this during my testing - the thumbnails opened up fairly quickly in my case. I'll take note of it and will fix it in later versions.
7. Correct - first time is slower because of the excessively large number of apps. I'll try to reproduce this.
9. Good idea. Will implement this as well.
10. If you hover on the thumbnail window the close and minimize buttons will show up. Are you talking about the ability to quit the app and all of its windows entirely?
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.
I can second the issue with the automatic color selection; with my background photo it cashes out to an illegible black on black, and there's no (obvious) option to change the theme or override the computed colors.
It seems like it would be relatively straightforward to honor the user's light mode/dark mode setting, and the WCAG accessibility guidelines [1] do a good job of both discussing the importance of luminance contrast to legibility, and providing resources and advice toward programmatically selecting text vs. background colors to ensure everything stays readable.
(I did go ahead and purchase a subscription, since I was one of the people who asked for the option. I'll keep an eye out over the coming weeks for updates! Considering the immediate and extensive interest in boringBar that's been very much evident today, I'm really looking forward to seeing where development goes on this. Congratulations on your successful Show HN!)
[1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum...
Hey. I'm seeing this issue with some other users as well and I'm trying to reproduce this - do you have the reduce transparency accessibility option enabled by any chance?
I do!
edit: Checking now I'm back in arm's reach of my laptop, I can further confirm disabling the option does resolve the issue on Sonoma. Nice catch!
Gnome 2 anyone?
Looks nice, I'm forced to use OSX at work, but it's a hard no for another subscription.
Was looking for this exact solution.
Show me a side-dockable vertical taskbar, circa Win XP thru 7 style - and a lifetime license for 10 years' worth of the subscription, which you may no longer even support by then - and you will have closed a sale.
“$9.99/year”. <closes tab>
C’mon, man, there’s not even a backend to support. Want more revenue next year? Release a new version that’s a compelling upgrade.
Wow this looks really neat. I am going to have to give it a try.
Subscriptions for apps that require absolutely no infrastructure to run make absolutely no sense to me. Hard pass.
Amazing what a bunch of swine the commenters are towards OP here. Always complaining, never creating anything of value themselves.
OP: Congratulations on what seems to be a very nice taskbar!
I have two suggestions:
- I miss the ability to pin folders like on the MacOS Dock. For example for your Downloads folder.
- The applications menu should open when the cursor clicks in the corner, not only over the icon. Fitts's law.
- The active window background color is too bright in dark mode. It draws too much attention on the screen.
Thanks. Regarding your suggestions:
- I see, I can work on adding folders to the dock, sure.
- Fair. I think the clickable area is too small, right? I think I had the same issue as well but I got used to it. Nevertheless I'll push an update to fix this in some time.
- I'll experiment with a few toned down versions of the active window chip.
Thanks for your feedback!
Looks great. Subscription? Big ol nope.
Imagine paying a subscription for your task bar.
"Exclusive access to the reset button of you computer, $0.99/month only!"
Not a mac user, looks cool... but a subscription for a simple boring and static task bar?
Fucking omega lol. April fools was 11 days ago my man. Charge me $50 if you want but absolutely fuck subscriptions.