Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS (boringbar.app)
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.
142 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadYou could even require paying for “upgrades” for major updates in the future. (Similar to that of Sketch or some apps made by Panic)
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...
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.
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.
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.
nobody's paying a subscription for a taskbar. The business model here is a one time sale.
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.
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.
The screenshots on the website look nice though.
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.