Show HN: A Pomodoro app for your menubar/tray | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Pomodoro app for your menubar/tray

github.com

40 pointsamitmerchant36 comments

I feel bad for folks using Electron. As soon as they try to demonstrate their hard work, the top comments are people vocally decrying Electron's resource usage, not their app that they've spent a lot of effort on. It probably feels very demoralizing when people instantly disregard your app due to Electron's resource usage.

Electron is a very easy way to develop applications, and it's definitely doing something right. I've written Gtk (my preference) and Qt for ages, and developing stuff in Electron was mind-blowingly fast, trivial to debug, and trivial to produce packaged binaries for multiple platforms. It's very difficult to achieve a similar development experience with native toolkits, and I think we'll continue seeing more Electron apps until native toolkits offer a comparable development experience.

Ultimately what matters is the user experience, not your development experience.

Isn't some kind of balance important? You want to have code that you can maintain and that others can work on, but also efficiency. I don't know if it's one of those 'unobtainable golden middle' things, but I feel as though C didn't strike a bad place with regard to system programming.

Unfortunately I've found graphical toolkits just really unpleasant and unportable to work with. I would much rather write for the web. However I have never used Electron.

They aren't being criticized for writing an electron app. The criticism is that they've written something that should be lightweight but isn't. Further, it probably is not useful unless it is lightweight.

> I feel bad for folks using Electron.

Me too, so I've started down voting such comments. At this point they are off topic and distract from actual useful feedback.

OP: your app looks pretty nice. I'd suggest offering the choice of a more muted tray icon (dark on light, and light on dark).

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. I'll surely look into it.

Electron... It's always so upsetting to see a tray widget require hundreds of megabytes of RAM to run.

What is a less resource intensive but similarly easy to use tool that would let you make desktop apps?

Qt is actually pretty easy to work with.

Really, though, I would prefer to use Electron. It would be great if they could find a way for multiple electron apps to share a runtime so it would save both memory and reduce the download size.

..like browser tabs? Obviously not the exact ui desired here, but an extension/bookmark would work, no?

Chrome apps? Maybe not, since I'm not sure they're still alive, but I like(d) them.

Not exactly. At least not until the browser has APIs to interact with more parts of the operating systems.

The only times I've considered writing an Electron app vs a web app (which is my day job) is when it would have benefitted from an offline-first and/or needed system resources like tray icons, interacting with other desktop apps, reading system-level stats, executing native code, etc.

For real. I made http://plusaroo.com/ recently. Mine seems to use ~ 30mb.

As much as it seemed like overkill to use Electron for it, it just made the most sense for me. Hopefully those faults with electron can be addressed.

C# & WinForms

Tut tut so pedestrian

I'm also going to have to mention this. I have zero interest in such a simple tray app that uses nodejs+Electron. It's like the worst of both worlds.

All of this could be done with standard C++ MFC and use literally no ram.

I suppose someone could make a system tray framework in Electron where each widget is a plugin. But yea, even 10 system tray widgets taking hundreds of megs of RAM seems a bit overkill.

"Pomodoro" as a time-management technique is a registered trademark:

https://cirillocompany.de/pages/the-pomodoro-technique-trade...

You forgot the (R). ;) But so did they in at least one instance on that page.

And for those reasons only I haven't used the same exact name and same exact logo. :)

Ianal but I'd be worried, you are quite close.

One of my favorite skills & challenges is do things as efficiency as possible, and using Electron for an app like this just strikes me as super-duper wasteful, especially for an app that'll be running all the time. That said, it's probably not going to make that huge of a dent in daily battery life.

I did Pomodoros all the time before I really started programming. Now I just like to lock into a flow and work until I can't or I get frustrated debugging and take a break

Indeed, I have never tried it because I always figured it was a work anti pattern. Glad to hear I'm not alone.

I do set a timer on my watch when I am taking a break (grabbing coffee / checking HN), but that's kind of the opposite of P.

Now that I think about it, as a smoker I've sort of naturally fell into some 'pomodoro-like' scheme with my own work, in that I generally work for 50-60~ minutes and then take a 5-10 minute fag break.

On a somewhat related note, I've noticed that I only really smoke (tobacco) at work, and rarely at home. I'll have 6-8 throughout my 10 hour workday and maybe 1 or 2 after I get home... I guess my job really is killing me haha.

For those wondering what the pomodoro technique is: http://pomodorotechnique.org

Similar to http://gnomepomodoro.org/

Been using it on xfce alright.

I too can vouch the goodness of this program.

About 7yrs ago I published a basic pomodoro app to app store . I received intellectual property infringement notice from 'FC Garage GmbH' to take my app down, which I did. The email on that notice was legal@pomodorotechnique.com, so I assume it has something to with the guy who created it.

A trademark claim does not restrict you from selling your product it merely restricts you from using their name and logo (or confusingly similar name/logo)

Aw man this looks cool but I was hoping for something more lightweight than Tomightly and its JVM requirement.

I cannot get behind the idea that I need 173 mb in libraries and module for what is essentially a simplistic timer, but it looks nice and works on linux (at least on my machien and from the screenshot it looks like it works on windows aswell), so I have mixed feelings about this app.

For all those who want to try/see the working of the app can check out this Codepen that I've set up : https://codepen.io/amit_merchant/pen/NpvZJo

(Electron issues aside) - Pretty nice & clean UI - gonna give it a try.

Hey! Thanks! Do let me know if you want any improvement/feature for the same.

shameless plug:

https://github.com/liloman/pomodoroTasks2

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