Nimble – A Wolfram Alpha Menubar Client for Mac OS X | Hacker News Reader

Nimble – A Wolfram Alpha Menubar Client for Mac OS X

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34 pointsjonbaer7 comments

Looks very clean, nice work! Although, I can't see myself using it. A simple example[1] of plotting a graph on Nimble shows only the first "card" of information which is pretty useless, but on WA it shows more relevant data[2] that I was looking for.

Also, the extracted app size is ~100MB large for a indicator that does so little. I'm guessing it's because of the bulk from Electron or some other shell app.

Side note: right-clicking it to automatically quit is very confusing.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/6yzYcRX.png

[2]: https://i.imgur.com/Fq1lNpc.png

Looks pretty neat.

Question: Why is this thing 170MB? Does it include the CDF player or something?

Suggestion: I use WA for nutritional info, so I make mishmash, then I do a search like: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+onions+and+5+cloves+g...

This gives me same custom-made nutrition label as on food packaging, but for whatever I just made. Nimble returns one of the caloric-breakdown tables instead, which isn't as useful.

The size is primarily due to Electron, Nimble's backbone. Unfortunately, a large portion of Nimble's size is due to to Electron, and there's not a whole lot we can do about that aside from shifting the project to a completely different framework, rebuilding Nimble from the ground up. Although this is true, we're still doing everything we can to bring the size down.

The information provided by Wolfram's API is rather limiting, and definitely not as extensive as the information provided through its web service. We'll see what we can do about this problem.

Hey awesome! I'm downloading now, but the number one thing I hate about Wolfram Alpha (which I use often) is how long it takes to get to the website to ask my question and wait for an answer. I'm really hopeful this puts WA as nearby as Spotlight is.

How long is the delay in Nimble?

I'm installing this. On a tangent, I wonder when we'll get Siri on OS X.

Too simple, it's both faster and more useful to just search Wolfram Alpha right away using Alfred or any other quicklauncher.

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