I recently switched from a Fedora/GNOME laptop to a MacBook Air. My old setup served me well as a portable workstation, but I’ve started traveling more while working remotely and needed something with similar performance but better battery life. The main thing I missed was a simple taskbar that shows the windows in the current workspace instead of a Dock that mixes everything together.
I built boringBar so I would not have to use the Dock. It shows only the windows in the current Space, lets you switch Spaces by scrolling on the bar, and adds a desktop switcher so you can jump directly to any Space. You can also hide the system Dock, pin apps, preview windows with thumbnails, and launch apps from a searchable menu (I keep Spotlight disabled because for some reason it uses a lot of system resources on my machine).
I’ve been dogfooding it for a few months now, and it finally felt polished enough to share.
It’s for people who like macOS but want window management to feel a bit more like GNOME, Windows, or a traditional taskbar. It’s also for people like me who wanted an easier transition to macOS, especially now that Windows feels increasingly user-hostile.
I’d love feedback on the UX, bugs, and whether this solves the same Dock/Spaces pain for anyone else.
P.S. It might also appeal to people who feel nostalgic for the GNOME 2 desktop of yore. I started my Linux journey with it, and boringBar brings back some of that feeling for me.
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.
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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.
Users get certainty, and you still have a clear path to future revenue when that window expires.
Subscription makes a lot more sense once you’re in cloud/collaborative territory which we've just entered. Sounds like you landed in a good place with this split.
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?
Some visibility into the roadmap and operations (an anonymous LLC doesn't really say "Trust") is needed for me to feel good about typing my credit card number into the form.
Old guard will say what they will about software licensing but at the end of the day it’s all the same.
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.
If you'd open source it then there is at least the chance of gaining a community. And you'd be giving back to the community that you have benefitted from for decades.
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.
> 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.
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.
Not people who are outraged by that concept.
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 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.
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.
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.
I have “Displays have separate Spaces” enabled for a few reasons, and I’d like to keep it that way.
I have “Show on all displays” in BoringBar turned off, because if I turn it on, then I lose the per-monitor window on the bar, which I want.
My MBP and First External Display have the opposite windows on their bars. Spotify is open on MBP, but showing on the monitor, and vice versa. The Main display is fine. External Display 2 is my “Main display” and External Display 1 and the MBP display are “Extend display”.
On the extended monitors, BoringBar doesn’t stop windows from going behind it (it auto resizes on the main display) when I maximize them.
I would really like if it had an option like Windows to group windows by application, but not to put them all in one “chip” as you call it. I just want all of my VSCode windows to be next to each other, without another app’s window in between. If I use your “Group windows by app” then I don’t like how hiding and showing from the bar works. In Windows 11, I always show window title and group windows by app.
Lastly, I’d like if all “chips” were the same size, even if some title text is shorter than others.
Great work so far. It feels far less janky than uBar or others I’ve tried. I’m hopeful and will keep an eye on it! Is there any way to reset my trial if you come out with these changes at a later date? For now I’ll be uninstalling it, as the windows on the wrong display is unusable.
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!
I didn't want to add the logout/restart/shutdown option initially, but I'll experiment with it to see how useful it is.
/s of course. Just pointing out that your comment is just to flame.
Also tablet OS? Gnome is keyboard driven with tiling features OOTB...
I'm tend to think of it as a server os with a DE, but as a backend developer I'm probably biased.
Maybe that's just what $10 worth of labor looks like in today's economy, though. Times are tough.
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).
All in all it does not seem like a polished app to me. I tried using it and I could not bring myself to buy it. The main reasons being its issues with multi-monitor support and waking up from sleep. boringBar does not have these issues.
Once it's set up, though, it's pretty rock solid.
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.
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.
It's a subscription with extra steps and worse retention.
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?
$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.
No judgement either way, I get that developers want to be compensated for their time. I just always found the difference in culture curious. I guess it's because if you're willing to spend the extra premium for Apple products, you're probably also willing to spend a little extra premium on the software too.
Depends. If you build software for others then of course you should be paid. But if you build sth for youself, to scratch you own itch, isn't that already compensation? Why try to milk that cow to for such a mini tool that just took a few weekends to build? (The author said that.) If everybody had followed that philosophy then the whole OSS ecosystem wouldn't exist. Time to pay back to the community and open source such a project.
Meanwhile I guess FOSS communists can continue to enjoy working for free programming crucial net infrastructure for companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft.
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.
- Sidebar looks like a decent app but on a cursory look it does not seem to take care of window overlapping (atleast on Tahoe). You can expand windows behind Sidebar and they stay there. This problem does not exist on boringBar.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
We really have entered the age of everything being a subscription.
How are they supposed to fund development? It's important to differentiate independent devs and the goliaths. When you release an app like this, it is "good enough" for more people. Your incentive to build the thing is that you can make a living off of it and continue crafting it with the intent of building other great things. The biggest software companies have many revenue streams and ways to cover costs that are very different from independent devs.
When you sell perpetual use software, you have the incentive to release yearly versions (or whatever cadence is best.) You are incentivized to only put bugfixes into next year's version to force upgrades. Users lose out because they don't get bug fixes and the developer is put in a spot where they have to look for more devious ways of making a profit.
To make money the cost of perpetual software is also very high. Devs make terrible compromises here to seem reasonable, but you need to move a lot of units to reduce the price to the level possible with subscription software.
Subscriptions are far from perfect, but they bring some balance. Next time you complain, it would be an interesting exercise to state what you would be prepared to pay and how often.
By people buying the software. That's how it works for plenty of game devs, especially indie ones
It would be great to allow offline activation - as others have pointed out, using the application after the activation servers may go away is something that is useful for an application like this.
Also, the application viewer seems a bit clunky - please allow sorting pinned items via drag & drop, or always sort them alphabetically. A mouse over highlight effect is also missing.
I'll take a look into the app launcher issues that you are pointing out. The drag and drop feature will be implemented later this week in the bar window list and in the app menu as well.
I'll research a bit into the offline activation methods as well to see what best suits this app.
I have found a few more issues meanwhile - e.g. folders inside Applications are not visible in the app menu. It would also be great to be able to access & empty the Bin from e.g. the applications menu as doing that without the dock is really inconvenient.
It would be great if you could provide a way to send you these reports outside of HN, where I know that you will see them. :)
Thanks for this software. I am really enjoying it so far and hope it'll continue to evolve!
- Would like the ability to customize colours or themes (i.e. taskbar background, application menu button colour, chip background colour, chip active state colour, etc.)
- In another comment you mention that you haven't figured out how to display badge counts without having the app open, but I am not seeing badge counts even with the app open. For example, when someone sends me a message in Messages, the badge count that shows up in the dock never shows up in boringBar. Strangely, other apps that do not show a badge count in my dock show a badge count in boringBar! (This one is a deal breaker for me given the amount of messaging I do through that app. The badge count is something I rely on a lot.)
- My preference is to have "Show Windows Names" enabled. But in certain apps it does not behave as I would expect. For example, when the Mac Messages app is open, it always has a conversation selected, which means the name of the Messages app in boringBar is always the name of the person whose last conversation you had selected. Messages may be a unique case, but for me I would like for it to just be called "Messages" no matter who I am talking to.
- On the subscription debate: I am not anti-subscription, but the value proposition has to be there. $10/month for a dock substitute is too much for me. That's $120/year. $1200/decade per user, for what amounts to a marginal quality of life improvement to the operating system. I think a proper price for something like this that is fair to the developer and to the end user is a $40 - $80 perpetual license with one year of updates included.
2. Sure, I'll experiment with the Messages app to reproduce this. Thanks for pointing this out.
3. It's $10 per year and not month. There is a $40 perpetual license already on the purchase link - https://boringbar.app
My apologies, I was working off memory from when I first looked at it yesterday. I think that $10 per year is totally reasonable. But given the current extreme distaste for subscriptions, I think that a $40 one time perpetual license is probably going to work more in your favour.
On the default XDR M2 Pro MBP display I'm on, I have it set to the default scaling for reasons, but I'd really like to be able to scale the BoringBar to be... quite a lot larger... maybe a scale bar, or maybe add an XL and XXL option?
https://i.imgur.com/V5vXq6t.png
One other feature request: allow users to click and drag pinned (or any) icons on the taskbar. I very much arrange my pinned apps spatially so I know where to look/find/launch them. I know that I can effectively be deliberate in my pinning to try to get them in the right spot, but that's obviously quite limiting.
Just bought a license, though, and really enjoy this! Well done!
Another observation: many macOS apps (e.g. pages, mail, keynote, etc.) like to stay open even without having any active windows. This is completely hidden by boringBar, which leads to tons of apps being open without the user being aware of it (-> memory waste). Furthermore, actually using such an app then requires me to awkwardly type the name of the app even though it's already open.
I think it would be better if such passive apps without windows still have chips, perhaps smaller ones without a window title.
Regarding the foreground issue, in case it's relevant: The app has all the permissions it requested. This is on a macOS 26.2 on a M4 MBP.
On the other observation, it works this way because apps on macOS do not usually quit when you close all of their windows. If you start an already open app again when it has no windows open, it will bring the app into focus, and you will see it in the menu bar.
Regarding your recommendation, I think I’ll need to experiment with it a bit, since it’ll be important to differentiate between pinned apps and apps with no windows in the bar.
- Lots of iTerm shells open: easy to access, but iTerm’s window titles don't make it easy to find the one I want, and neither does this
- (the big one) Lots of browser windows each with multiple tabs make it hard to find the tab you want if it's not at the front of the window it's in. Would be more compelling if there were a way for it to look inside (eg,) Brave and represent each tab as a window
Otherwise: some lag in updating thumbnails occasionally confusing; it doesn't seem to do anything clever to cope when things spill off the right-hand end (eg, good time to group by app if you weren't already); quitting did not bring the dock back, as claimed.
(I exclusively use cmd-tab, which is a Docker feature)
My use case is fairly simple: I usually have multiple VS Code windows open at the same time and I have a habit of moving windows related to a certain task to a specific space. The default Dock mixes every window up and I just want to offload the which-window-is-where tracking to some other app - in this case boringBar.
Taskbar, Uber, etc. cost less and have unlimited updates. How is this better?
- 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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
The good news is someone definitely will (or perhaps already has) done this without one.
boringBar does not suffer from these issues. That's the reason why I built it. It works as expected from day 1.
Some features I'd like:
- XL bar size - even large feels a bit small on a 6K display
- I have grouped windows off, but it would be nice if there was an option to still sort the chips by app, so all the app's windows are listed adjacent to eachother
- If not using the suggest idea above, it would also be nice to be able to drag and drop chips to sort them in the order I want
- Make the Applications menu open for clicks on the entire bottom left area of the screen so I can slam my cursor in the general direction, where it ends up at the bottom left pixel, and click like I could in Windows to open the Start menu
- Ability to give a desktop a name
- Ability to map a key or sequence (e.g. opt, opt) to open the Applications menu, again like how you could open Windows' Start menu with a key
Bugs:
- Clicking a chip to minimise a window, then clicking it again to restore it sometimes causes the window to change size.
- Quitting boringBar spawned three stacks of these: https://postimg.cc/WhmwHGNz even though it already has permissions granted. Clicking "Allow" just spawns another one so they never go away. boringBar is not running in Activity Monitor. Had no choice but to reboot.
- This has been said by another user as well. I am on a 4K monitor - if possible could you share a screenshot of how it looks like currently?
- That's a fair ask. I will take a note of it.
- Drag and drop is something I am working on as well. It will be released in the next version of the app.
- Again, fair. I think I got used to it because I've been using it for a while. But this is being worked on as well and will be released in the next version.
- Ability to give a desktop a name is easy enough. I'll work on this.
- Ability to map a key or sequence for the app menu - you can already do this from the boringBar settings: Just right click on the empty space in the bar and select settings. You can then record a shortcut there.
Regarding the first bug: I do not have a fix for it yet, but I am trying to reproduce it as of now.
I'll try to reproduce the second one as well - this shows up if you are trying thumbnails for the first time - but only just one pop up and not this many.
One thing I'd love to see: integration with tiling WMs. Being able to see which windows are in the current yabai Space, and maybe even switch between stacked windows, would be amazing.
Does boringBar play nicely with yabai or similar tools?
PS: How to contact developer? I cannot find email.
Neat idea!
The hitbox part is being requested a lot. It'll be a part of the next update too.
If you prefer the way Windows works, just use Windows! Both platforms have their merits.
At work, my OS is largely dictated by my employer. At home, the choice is mine, but largely influenced by the use case and application availability.
Thus, I do not use any one OS exclusively and and likely never will. I prefer Linux, but find macOS better than Windows for all but one thing: window management. Even Windows 95 absolutely trounces macOS there. I just don't understand how macOS can be so bad at it. Every attempt to make it better (e.g., Spaces and Stage Manager) takes them even further astray.
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.
- 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!
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 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.
Also a user feedback/contact method in settings should be your first priority
First, I can't figure out how to open the settings of the app. Is there any? Right now I have your bar on top of the regular macos dock. Obviously that's not the correct behavior. I also can't figure out how to have it display on two monitors, and if it's like windows where it only shows apps that are active on that monitor in the bar?
Lastly, where's the contact or any other information for people with pretty standard questions like me?
Also it would be nice to not have to give screen recording permissions becuase I dont care about previews.
EDIT
I stumbled on the right click menu. I have no further gripes. This is amazing. Thanks for the great work. Smooth out the onboarding and I think you'd have a pretty polished user experience.
The screenshots on the website look nice though.
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
On my end, I managed to first develop an open-source alternative status bar based on Übersicht (https://github.com/Jean-Tinland/simple-bar) 6 years ago and then a standalone rewrite in Swift (https://github.com/Jean-Tinland/a-bar) if anyone is interested. Though both bars require yabai or AeroSpace to work.
1. some windows do not show up in the list, eg: this very app's settings window, when open, does not show up.
2. "group by app" is a bit much, since i like a full window list, but "order by app" would be nice (so all Sublime windows are next to each other in the list), this avoids: "sublime file a, sublime file b, finder, sublime find c" which is messy
How does this work with the dock in macOS? I mean you only have so many places you can put the dock, certainly not the top because that’s reserved for the mighty blue Apple.
Good luck!
I love the landing page - ugh just so perfect for the HN audience. I am pretty happy with the dock but after reading your landing, I felt like I need it.
Also, don't listen to people about pricing. $10/year as you have it is already cheap considering I'll end up using it every day (if I like it). People will never be satisfied.
I couldn't find your email on the site or in the app.
"Connection Error
boringBar could not contact the activation servers. Reconnect to the internet and try again."
Plus, I‘d prefer to (but that’s impossible?) install via the App Store, to avoid a black box.
the only problem that i have, right now, is colors: i usually have everything in my computer as black[0], so the white highlight on the bar is so jarring! being able to replace that with something else is going to be great.
- Clicking things in the Dock or elsewhere keep taking me off my current Space. There's a setting that supposedly stops this (disable "When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for that application"), but that only affects affirmative clicking in the Dock. If you try to open a file it will still seek out an existing instance of that app and take you to another Space if it finds it there.
- Spaces are named "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", etc. I need to give them custom names that represent the actual work I do in them.
This is by no means a complete list. My overall impression is that Spaces and their various settings are a bolt-on, with requirements built by committee to resolve the tension between the users who want virtual desktops and the users who want nothing to change.
@OP, here are my suggested improvements based on a morning's worth of use:
1. If you have clicked on the Applications button to raise that menu, clicking on the button again should collapse it. Right now it just re-raises it.
2. Let's say one of my apps is a messaging app like Slack or Signal, and there's a new incoming message. In KDE Plasma or GNOME, the taskbar or docked representation of the app will visually change (as does your chip) but more importantly there's a toast-style an on-screen notification. I'm actually not sure what happens on the Mac by default when you're using the Dock. Regardless, I'm finding I'm missing incoming messages because I'm not scanning boringBar for the visual indicator that a new message has come in.
3. Allow us to give our own names to the Spaces/Desktops.
4. Provide an option for rendering the Space/Desktop switcher as an array of chips so we can switch with one click, rather than the current two clicks (one to raise the pop-up menu, two to choose the desktop). The lack of (3) and (4) has me sticking with "Deskspace" for now, but also because Deskspace parks the desktop switcher in the menu bar, which is similar to how I have it working on KDE Plasma.
5. As another user pointed out, the bar is... dark. Changing on/off Frosted Glass isn't sufficiently changing the visual appearance.
nobody's paying a subscription for a taskbar. The business model here is a one time sale.
But Dawg? Really!
I really like this panel, do you have a linux version config or dot files that is similar looking?
edit: also it didn't work for me - I can tap buttons but the corresponding window won't open.
edit2: after a restart it did work...
iToddlers BTFO
And since full-screen apps on MacOS work on different workspaces, and the bar is context-dependent to the workspace - this means that I have to choose to work on a maximized window or have it in my taskbar. It will be nice if there is an option to consolidate all the apps. Static, sticky, salad.
And damn, I used to pay $100-200 for an entire OS, now its $40 for a taskbar. - "Old man yells at inflated clouds"
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.
