- You display the number '8' in your demo -- what does this represent? Stories are frequently added to HN
- You provide a lot of functionality in the Menu tool (vote, comment), but you don't provide the actual content -- presumably this is opened in a browser? If you look at Spotlight, it provides a preview, though this is probably not readable enough
- It seems to me that keeping simple is important; for example, keeping to a single rectangle like Spotlight could be a good UI pattern; having multiple rectangles that are locked in places feels very klunky
That said, I think designing this could be very fun and a great learning experience. Someone once told me that the the reason to create tools is to help yourself; if this tool ends up being fun and useful for you to use, you have succeeded (a lot of others call this "dogfooding", though I think that has a bit of a negative ring to it).
Some tips regarding engineering:
- this could be a useful GitHub project to get started with NSStatusItems (i.e. menubar apps), if you haven't already seen it -- https://github.com/shpakovski/Popup
- it might be very very effective to use Python, at least for prototyping, especially for scraping information from HN; in particular, I am thinking of BeautifulSoup, though similar packages may exist for ObjC; to integrate Python into your app, you can either use something like PyObjc or directly bundle in a python interpreter and read output from it...
The number eight signifies that there's 8 stories on the frontpage that you haven't read yet.
You also read the story itself in the browser (I don't wanna go back and forth from the browser). You can see that "functionality" if you click on "web view".
- You display the number '8' in your demo -- what does this represent? Stories are frequently added to HN
- You provide a lot of functionality in the Menu tool (vote, comment), but you don't provide the actual content -- presumably this is opened in a browser? If you look at Spotlight, it provides a preview, though this is probably not readable enough
- It seems to me that keeping simple is important; for example, keeping to a single rectangle like Spotlight could be a good UI pattern; having multiple rectangles that are locked in places feels very klunky
That said, I think designing this could be very fun and a great learning experience. Someone once told me that the the reason to create tools is to help yourself; if this tool ends up being fun and useful for you to use, you have succeeded (a lot of others call this "dogfooding", though I think that has a bit of a negative ring to it).
Some tips regarding engineering:
- this could be a useful GitHub project to get started with NSStatusItems (i.e. menubar apps), if you haven't already seen it -- https://github.com/shpakovski/Popup
- it might be very very effective to use Python, at least for prototyping, especially for scraping information from HN; in particular, I am thinking of BeautifulSoup, though similar packages may exist for ObjC; to integrate Python into your app, you can either use something like PyObjc or directly bundle in a python interpreter and read output from it...
Good luck!