Discussion
jofzar: Interestingly to me this is what raycast actually is for me now. Most of my common workflows are just raycast keybinds now or quickly typed in.An example is I have my airpods bound to ctrl+alt+b to connect via Bluetooth. This is to have it yank back control from my android phone.
woadwarrior01: This reminds of a similar windows shareware system tray app from ~25 years ago called Genius.
vivid242: Lovely! Would appreciate a release via the App Store / notarization or so… is there a newsletter so I could get notified?
nehal3m: Hmm, green account, no comments or submissions, generated website for an unsigned app with power user features. That’s a no from me dawg.
xattt: [delayed]
ctmnt: This looks cool enough, but it’s starting to drive me crazy how people are in such a rush to put out their macOS apps they can’t be bothered to get a developer account and run a one line command. It’s not hard.I used to be sympathetic to complaints about not wanting to pay the developer account fee. But when you’re vibe coding, you’re probably paying a good chunk of change to your LLM supplier of choice every month, and the yearly developer account fee seems minor in comparisonAlso, it’s just such a bad security precedent. This page describes the error you get as “the typical macOS Gatekeeper warning”, as though it were just another piece of corporate silliness, like clicking through a EULA.
71bw: The truth is that Gatekeeper should go the way of the devil.It is my machine and I paid for it, why does the OS care about what I do with it? The only thing this leads to is making sure your customers grow into good little lemmings.
apples_oranges: Nice, but, and this is not personal, I would not trust this app with my computer internals. Probably also asks for sudo from time to time.. but I might ask Claude to make something similar for myself.. (sorry but just being honest)
virajk_31: That should not be a problem. I also used to just skim through posts and comments here without really interacting.
mgrunwald_: Understandable! This is a pre-release of the app. You can come back later when everything is in place and the app is officially released, signed and notarized :)
nehal3m: The idea seems cool so I’ll keep an eye on it, but as a paranoid sysadmin I’ll wait for the flags to turn green.
mgrunwald_: The donors are 100% real, early supporters of the app.
menno-dot-ai: I'm getting an invalid SSL certificate too to complete the bingo card
mgrunwald_: The SSL certificate is issued through Cloudflare. What issues are you having?
0x3f: If you don't want your name, address, phone number on public display you need to either set up a company or set up some forwarding. If you set up a company, you'll need to get a DUNS number. If you haven't done it before and don't know about the secret shortcut way to do that, it is very annoying to get one.Anyway, I don't see a problem with getting it out the door. People can just choose not to install it if they don't like it. I mean that's the whole idea of being early anyway, isn't it? Don't like a crappy bodged together UI? Don't like a lack of support? Don't like an unsigned app? You can wait until it has those things according to your preferences. In the meantime, the creator gets real users and feedback ASAP.
gsibble: Yeah, I'm not trusting some app like that randomly on my computer.
vladde: the website design is cool as h*ck
jacobrast: So that you don't accidentally run malware. MacOS is not iOS, you can run unsigned code if you really want to, but it will make you jump through a few hoops.
mgrunwald_: Gatekeeper and notarization are not silliness. They exist for a reason. I thought it would be a good idea to release the app during development when I am sure that it works correctly and then maybe get some feedback from early users.
s3p: [delayed]
pieterhg: Awesome. Can you add extra bright mode like Vivid? I'd love to get rid of Vivid cause it's so buggy and never re-enables after I close my MacBook Pro
vyaa: Secret shortcut?!?
0x3f: I don't know how obvious it is these days, but the default path through D&B's website is the terrible one. They will try to extract money from you and harass you forever. You had to find Apple's own embedded form for it by using their search and going through some flow.
RicDan: Interesting how posts like these seem to be catapulted to #1 spot so quickly
throwaway290: It's free so why not just publish it on github then so that people could read the code and compile it themselves.Right now it's closed source binary with a big fat "DOWNLOAD FOR FREE" button and instructions casually telling you to disable the last barrier between your system and persistent malware. Nobody should recommend this to anybody
0x3f: Well, depends what the author's plans are for the future. Maybe it's not always going to be free as in beer, either.
mgrunwald_: Thanks!
subdomain: Seems really useful -- I love the website design!
mgrunwald_: I'm very glad you like it! Thanks!
mgrunwald_: Understandable! You can come back later when everything is in place and the app is officially released, signed and notarized :)
foltik: You forgot closed source. It’s a closed source dropdown menu.
newsclues: I want to be a power user on my Mac, I don’t want my mom’s Mac to function like my devbox.People like and need the apple sandbox. Others need an unlocked *nix machines
TeMPOraL: It's fine as long as both exist and third parties are not allowed to know which one you're running.Otherwise, you have banks and MAFIAA and others off-loading their own security and compliance costs to users by flat out discriminating based on the status of the sandbox.
71bw: How is this better than trying to eliminate the problem between the keyboard and the computer? The user won't learn if the computer handholds them through everything.
fouc: [delayed]
mcjiggerlog: You don't need to do any of that to sign and notarize an app that you are distributing yourself.
LatencyKills: Ex-Apple macOS/Xcode dev here.I just downloaded your app and ran it through hopper. There is a LOT of embedded Apple Script. I would never run an app like this with SIP disabled or without an active network blocker.Your app requires direct access to major OS components: code signing, even during alpha should be a requirement.
geerlingguy: Along with a number of posts praising the "website design". Besides novel designs (I think of Acko.net) it's not often I see comments on that here.
alsetmusic: I get that there's a market to put command line preferences in a GUI wrapper, but wasn't HN going to limit posts from new accounts? Oh, it's not in Show HN. They found a loophole.Meanwhile, I'm running Claude Code and asking it to make me stupid bespoke things that only I want and I'm not spamming the internet with those tools because they aren't novel or useful for most people and you can have Claude Code build a version for the way that you work.Go away, green accounts. Everyone is pretty tired of your presence.
moralestapia: >secret shortcutI see vagueposting has found its way into HN.
0x3f: I haven't done it in a while, so didn't want to give out possibly wrong directions, but:> I don't know how obvious it is these days, but the default path through D&B's website is the terrible one. They will try to extract money from you and harass you forever. You had to find Apple's own embedded form for it by using their search and going through some flow.
mgrunwald_: Understandable. Yes, it asks for sudo from time to time, but it is designed to be as safe as possible in what it does.
user3939382: Gatekeeper is a travesty and assault on user freedom. Apple should not be in charge of what you run on your computer, at all. Any exception to this should be opt in. If a user wants to insert a third party between themselves and a programmer they can elect to do that.Let’s not forget when Apple’s certificate server was down and suddenly you couldn’t launch apps on macOS, to say nothing of the abuse of user rights.
drfloyd51: Users used their freedom to choose macOS. Gatekeeper is a desirable feature. They opted-in with their purchase.
foltik: Speak for yourself, I used my freedom to disable it.
michaelmior: This article[0] provides some details. Basically if you go through the lookup process on Apple's website and your organization doesn't have a D-U-N-S number, you can request one from D&B for free via Apple.[0] https://support.pushpay.com/s/article/Acquire-your-D-U-N-S-n...
coffeecantcode: Still unbelievable that they require a DUNS number and not a simple EIN, that fact alone set our app launch back weeks.
andersonpico: vibe coded bullshit; also why is it top of the front page? are we botting votes now?
andersonpico: and if you published software here it would also be suspicious
mgrunwald_: I understand your skepticism, but as the original poster and creator of this I am actually a little surprised, too!
piva00: The user also shouldn't need to potentially suffer massive financial impacts from not being good enough at using a computer... Even more if it's a problem that can be solved by the computer itself as it's done already.It's like you are saying that potentially dangerous tools shouldn't have safety guards whenever possible, with little impact for the common use of the tool. Kinda absurd to think that way... If some advanced use-cases require safety guards to be removed that's when the user should be trained enough to know the risks.People want to use a computer for their tasks, the whole motto of Apple was to make technology accessible to normal people without requiring them to be tech-savvy, what you want goes in complete opposition to that mission.
sosuke: Unrelated to the app but I dig your website design.
mgrunwald_: Thanks!
karimf: Totally agree. There are significantly more new apps being released. I've been visiting the /r/macapps subreddit and they're having trouble filtering new submissions. I generally like the direction that they're taking https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ryaeex/rmacapps_m...Even though it's more troublesome to submit apps to App Store, it's one signal that the app is not a malware.
g947o: Wow, this subreddit looks like the apocalypse of vibe coded projects/apps. Kind of similar to what happened to "show HN". Too many ideas, not enough problems to solve, and likely bad implementations. The result is that nobody uses any of the apps.In AI conversations, people often forget that at the end of a day, an actual human needs to use your stuff.
