Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS

Is there some more expensive tiers to change the color or do I need to pay a premium?

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.

“$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.

Would have loved it if this was free!

Love it!

Looks nice, I'm forced to use OSX at work, but it's a hard no for another subscription.

Gnome 2 anyone?

subscription. bye.

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.

Looks great. Subscription? Big ol nope.

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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.