Cerebro App – Open-source productivity booster with a brain
cerebroapp.com
cerebroapp.com
As many others in this thread have pointed out, Cerebro is a pretty cool app that borrows from some core OS functionality and improves on it. Is its design 100% perfect? Maybe not. However, instead of commenting the application isn't exactly the way YOU would have done it and complaining try offering some constructive criticism.
If the app is memory hogging, not following best coding practices, or you have a cool idea of how something could be done instead share that feedback and offer better ways to do things. Not only does this benefit the developers working on this app but it helps others who may be working on becoming better developers themselves.
I myself am a naive developer. However I enjoy developing in my free time to keep myself thinking and I enjoy learning new things. I frequently visit this community to see what others are working on and looking at all the cool applications that people develop is a great way to pass time. If I had worked on something really hard, posted it, and then received some of these comments I would be extremely discouraged.
That said, if a Cerebro developer is reading, this looks like a really cool improvement on Spotlight (I use OSX). Keep up the good work and don't let the negative comments in here discourage you or your team!
For instance, I am currently learning data science from the ground up (i.e. reading the fundamental mathematical literature) and doing it outside of a university program. It is disheartening to post a question, to say Cross Validated, and have a few critical commenters almost laugh the motivation out of me. So, I can emphasize.
However, on the other hand, as a software practitioner, I am often on the other side of the fence. In this field in particular it seems like there are often amateurs who decide to jump in with an arrogant disrespect for the existing community knowledge and practices. I think it's because software is very cool now (like statistics, etc.). And, in software it's easy to find some code and libraries and 'wire them together' in crude ways.
Note, I am not implying that this is the case here! I haven't even looked at the software nor read most of the comments. But, since I often see this happening, I know that such comments are expected. I'm only commenting on your perspective.
I am not against autodidacts. In fact, I am one myself. And, I encourage it. But, all autodidacts should expect and embrace criticism from the community. It sucks to take it, because often commenters are often overly harsh and blunt. But, in defense of them, every community will be like this, to some degree. And, it's expected. Many of these practitioners have spent their life doing it, and they have some right to be critical, don't they?
In spirit i agree with you.
In practice the problem here is, to use a really crude analogy:
The Cerebro developers rented an empty mall for super cheap, then opened a single restaurant in it. Some people won't mind driving all the way there and walking through the entire thing to get to the restaurant, other people will.
The advice then in that situation is to one of these:
1. Demolish the parts of the mall that aren't used, piece by piece, while trying to not knock over the restaurant situated on the third floor, so other people can build their houses on the now free space, closer to the restaurant.
2. Abandon it and build a new restaurant in the middle of the city.
Everyone recognizes that both of these are very expensive solutions and unlikely to ever be implemented, so you end up with two kind of people.
1. Those who shrug and walk away saying nothing.
2. Those who go, with various amounts of emphasis: "Aw, i wish you hadn't done that."
There is no happy middle ground possible here, sadly.
And the only difference it has is being much heavier because it's electron.
* Ulauncher http://ulauncher.io/
* Albert https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert#albert-
* Synapse https://launchpad.net/synapse-project
* Kupfer https://kupferlauncher.github.io/
* Zazu http://zazuapp.org/
* M-x counsel-linux-app http://oremacs.com/2016/03/16/counsel-linux-app/
I've tried a couple, but I always end up back to Alt+F2 in XFCE, since most of these launchers always start so slowly in comparison, and I never use any other features (more than once) than starting Firefox/Emacs/Terminal …
It basically connects to the NTFS database, fo that's why it is instant. Still don't understand why OS does not do this.
I use locate for now, but I'm still to find something that does it as well.
To get the total you need to find all of them and sum them up. That might be easier in the Details tab. Or use Process Explorer instead.
We made it run on Windows XP machine with 256 mb ram total. Oh and we embedded cherrypy into it.
For lots of products with performance as a criterion, pyqt toolchain is so much better than electron. And programming in qt isnt bad at all.
Qt does not need to be dynamically linked. In fact the commercial versions of qt have even better toolchains.
Yes it is.
Not gonna replace (native) Alfred for me, no.
Electron apps drain my mac battery super fast. It's a pity.
What does seem to be in the app's control is whether it is fast.
See VS Code and Atom; huge difference in performance but both will chew up your battery.
So even if Electron is a solid foundation, there is probably a bias towards inexperienced developers in who it attracts to work with it.
That's pretty much it. There's no useful way to make electron slimmer in any way, since it comes with the full chrome browser in the backpack and there's nothing you can do, because chrome's being the base of the huge pyramid with your teeny tiny bits of html and js on top.
It's useful for proto-typing or one-off apps, but for long-running things you're better of making it a chrome app directly (i.e. reusing Chrome's memory foot-print), or making it into a proper native app.
Having "information at your fingertips" really kills productivity for me. I need long stretches away from twitch reactions to "what's the capital of Uganda?" type of intrusive thoughts. I'd honestly pay for a "2 click" browser extension where you only get to make two clicks on any link per hour for a given domain on a blacklist of time sinks during certain hours.
Keep a small notebook beside you and promise yourself you are going to focus on the topic at hand for a period of time. When a thought, question or search topic pops into your brain, write it in the notebook. When you have some free time you can pick up the notebook at look up all those things. Of course, I often find that coming back to them they aren't all that important at all, and feeling of desperately needing to know has gone.
Otherwise, I try to create separate physical spaces for various tasks and try to practice mindfulness in general. It will always be an ongoing process though.
Here is more of a nuclear option that lets you micro manage your activity on an os-level. Unfortunately no Linux client afaik. A bit pricy, but very customizable and very effective: https://focusme.com
Am i missing something here?
On Linux, I use Super (Windows) key to use the inbuilt launcher which meets all my requirements. If Windows had anywhere near this level of usefulness in its start menu I wouldn't need the third party Wox.
I do think the criticism is productive, because it's usually not targeted against the developer or the app idea, but that it's built on the Electron framework. Maybe many developers using Electron do not have much experience and it seems like a good idea in their heads. In this case criticism is helpful because the developer will learn that Electron is bad and should be avoided.
A crude analogy: If I was driving on an divided highway in the wrong lane without knowing, I would be very grateful if the first car I met in the opposite lane would use the horn and blink the lights to get my attention so I could immediately stop and turn around.
Here's my version, Anycomplete: http://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete/
And the Show HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13065670
So, sure, great, more power to you if you want to write a tool like this. I'm just not feeling the pain that would make me have any interest in giving it a try.
It's like a very precise search engine for your personal machine.
It's amazing how great it works, and not having that available when I'm using a computer ruins things for me.
If that is not enough, Alfred also has lots of other awesome features.
Good job dev
Are anyone using keypirinha?
Is cerebro better?
anyway, from what i can tell, cerebro is able to show you a lot more things and also has plugins. keypirinha just shows basic things like files and apps i think
There's a neat comparison of different launchers available on Wikipedia[2].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Do 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_desktop_applicat...
As someone mentioned previously the Alt + F2 (or F3) works well enough in XFCE most of time.
I'll give Cerebro a try...
But this one is written in Javascript, so that is something going for it. More accessible, millions of packages to drop in easily.
Nice job.
> export default class AppUpdater { ......
why is this a class ? just so it can auto-exececute without being called ?
i would prefer an 'export default function init(){ // init code'
It's terrible. I already have hard times with Slack taking more memory than i would expect from a chat.
Yeah, I know that it's super hard to make native GUI these days, but please if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that.
Examples of good ol' native desktop apps : twitter for OSX.
Javascript is probably one of the most common languages, with Node.JS the most common server-side variant of it, allowing so very many people to contribute.
Also, we live in age where we don't have 100MB systems. At the moment the program is using a whole 30MB, which constitutes about 0.4% of my 8GB system.
I also had criticism in time for open source projects I worked on.
It's not about the person who did it, it's about my opinion and why I wouldn't use it.
Kudos for everyone doing open source.
Disagreeing with someone isn't the same as shitting on their hard work and good-faith effort to create something useful.
Comments such as "why didn't you make everything from scratch" probably aren't going to contribute much to the conversation.
> It's terrible.
It's awesome. Who cares if it takes more memory than someone would expect? That doesn't matter unless you're on a memory constrained system, in which case it's hardly the fault of developers looking to be productive. Electron is here to stay, and it is greatly improving the desktop app ecosystem imo.
> if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that
Electron is the perfect choice. Any web developer can quickly learn to contribute to an electron app. It's far easier to build community around electron apps than native apps, because there are more web developers than any other kind.
I care, because it's a waste of resources, I care because I don't need a daemon written in JS running in a loop sucking up my laptop battery, I care because I like it when my software doesn't randomly get in a loop maxing out a core, I care because I like it when my software is able to push out 60FPS animations.
You know, things Electron doesn't provide.
I get it, HTML+CSS is probably the fastest thing we have for UIs today, and it's not half bad. That doesn't stop software from being absolute crap.
Maybe Racket will come to the rescue soon :) it comes with full gui and graphics libraries, is a much saner language, and is performant (with major perf boosts in the works), cross-platform, has c interop... Optional type system...
Also:
> I don't need a daemon written in JS running in a loop sucking up my laptop battery
This is not JS (or Electron) specific.
> I like it when my software doesn't randomly get in a loop maxing out a core
Again, this is not JS (or Electron) specific.
> I like it when my software is able to push out 60FPS animations.
This is not JS (or Electron) specific either.
> This is not JS (or Electron) specific either.
Pikzen could be more respectful. But to be fair, it is really reeally hard to make animations smooth all the time with web technologies. I have never seen a web app or Electron app being smooth all the time, on all my hardware. Usually there is some amount of stuttering. I mean, come on, we did 60 fps in the 90s, so even hardware from 10 years ago should be able to achieve 60 fps all the time without breaking a sweat. I know there are hardware accelerated CSS animations but for some reason smooth animations remain hard, e.g. because of garbage collector pauses, accidental relayouts or whatever.
Native UIs tend to fare much better. Though to be fairer still, even they fail at delivering smooth animations all the time (but still succeed more often than web tech). For exmaple macOS Sierra has more animation stutterings on my latest Macbook Pro than OS X Lion from 2008.
sudo rm -rf /lib/modules/*/kernel/drivers/hid/usbhid/
and we'll all be better off.
I feel like "want" is a strong word though. I don't exactly believe you've earned any right to get personal information. I'll give you a hint though, it's over 25.
In all seriousness though, when HN lives in a safe space where being told your work is shit isn't accepted, what other answers do I have aside from being snarky? It's okay to be told your work is shit. It's better when you're told why it's shit, sure. But that's not a judgement on you, as a person. It's about your work. It's shit. And it's fine, no hard feelings. Start over, you'll maybe do it better.
Choosing electron to build an application means you didn't care about those implications either by negligence, ignorance or a combination of both and you can't expect a positive response when you neglect those issues just because you wanted to build something with the minimum possible effort to ship the application as fast as possible.
If we just blindly praised the efforts of people, the end result would be more apps built with electron, and that is abhorrent.
The less electron-based running apps, the better. The only electron app I (sometimes) use is Atom.
I have switched to slack on browser, instead of the app.
The author seems non-hispanic, it could be a reference to X-Men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebro
Spanish must have stolen it in an alternate universe when the X-men went back in time fighting the spanish inquisition disguised as lumberjacks and it's ok.
I don't expect it that it was the Spanish Inquisition.
Cerebrō was Latin for brain before it was Spanish, so probably it's some kind of Future Past thing with the Colosseum. Which explains why it's so beat up, but not how Magneto lifted it when the Romans didn't have steel-reinforced concrete.
Commentaries have a valid point, with or without creation.
This is the internet.
And this is a (mainly) hacker community -who are not known for their politeness-, and good engineering matters for hackers. (as it should) I think that this is the perfect medium for rudeness.
The whole reason people post their projects here is to get criticism of any kind. If one is disheartened because of a rude comment, one needs to grow up.
One needs to learn how to deal with comments; learn to decide on which ones to take seriously and which ones to not..
The good thing about the internet is that most of us are anonymous here. So you can not judge my comments based on my identity (or my history, e.g. what i have done). Nor you can punch me in the face for being rude or something. The thing you get in exchange is honesty (hopefully).
This is healthy. Let's embrace it, and keep politeness and politics for face-to-face meetings.
And you hold this up as an ideal rather than something we can improve upon? Tone matters.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
If you want to act differently than in real life, this is not the site.
I might be wrong.
I was trying to say that everybody needs to learn how to deal with rude people/comments.
This does not justify the bad tone nonetheless.
Gatekeeper on Mac OS, while ostensibly a "security" restriction, is nothing more than a blatant money-grab by Apple.