Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/pV...

Things I noticed right a way:

- The logo and the title font. There's nothing wrong about them, but they don't reflect much about the application - Scrolling, there are a few elements that appear over the header bar

It's hard for me to evaluate how useful this would be to my workflow without seeing the API, and it looks like I have to actually run the app to do that. It might be worth putting a copy on the website.

Regarding online documentation, good idea, thanks! I'll try to add that this week. Although, the app is so much more than its API, which is what makes it so unique, and I think if people just look at the API itself, they don't quite get to feel the experience of using Autumn to create their own automation workflows, which is what I'm most proud of about Autumn.

For me that is always one of the most sore points of almost every single desktop application, or at least those released this side of the millennium (older stuff tend to have actual offline documentation with them).

I don't use macOS these days (i dislike how Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility and every time i upgrade macOS i have apps i bought break left and right - at this point almost nothing works on my oldest iMac), but thumbs up for providing your users documentation with the software they bought instead of sticking it to some wiki in a web server somewhere and hoping for the best (of course having the docs available on the web is fine and for some welcome, since they can check out what the app can do before even buying it, just not as a replacement for local docs you can pull up at any moment regardless of your internet connectivity - or even version of the software).

[1] https://www.peppercarrot.com (highly recommended if your tolerance for cute/silly is high :-)

Oh, and the author's patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/davidrevoy

If I care about convenience, why wouldn't I just use the default WM? Quality is also debatable. For a WM productivity is far more important than quality.

If the subject is interesting/useful I don’t believe forum software matters that much to us users. All those that you mentioned would work fine, I’d say.

Notification issues I have tried to solve with Bettertouchtool and Hammerspoon, but I havent been able to find notification API access in them. Though I don’t know if Apple provides such access to notifications. Use cases I have are reacting to Slack, iTerm, Mail and browser notifications as events. I’d like to access the notification content in plain text or object and then decide how to process it. Depending on message content, time of day, place, connected network &c I could put up rules on how to proceed. I could show notifications on touchbar or on screen in less distracting ways than what notification center allows. I could pool certain notifications and check them all in one place, such as bot messages from various slack channels.

Notifications seem easier way to get information moving between apps than trying to use their specific APIs (if such is even available). Sort of light weight RPC from apps to my custom tools.

I was interested in Slate because I was looking for a good way to implement pie menus for a Mac window manager. And I'd already implemented pie menus for HTML, so I wanted to come up with a way to use that code (and any other html user interface or graphics too, of course) in the window manager.

About 5 years ago I opened this issue, describing an experiment I did making the web browser in a topmost window with a transparent background to implement user interface overlays scripted in HTML.

WebView window for HTML user interfaces like pie menus to Slate. #322: https://github.com/jigish/slate/issues/322

Slate used a hidden WebView for its scripting engine. So I made it un-hidden and float on top of all the other windows, and was easily able to use it to draw any kind of user interface stuff on top of all the other Mac windows. And I could track the position of windows and draw a little clickable tab next to or on top of the window title bar, that you could click on to pop up a pie menu.

It actually worked! But I didn't take it much further, because I never got any feedback on the issue I opened, so gave up on using Slate itself, and never got around to starting my own JavaScript window manager myself (like you did!). I opened my issue in June 2013, but the last commit was Feb 2013, so development must have stopped by then.

But I wrote up a description of my ideas about "aQuery" (like jQuery, for accessibility), and bounced the idea off of some people who are into accessibility and user interface design, and learned about Morgan Dixon's work on Prefab, something you should definitely check out if you're developing a window manager.

https://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery

Here's an HN posting that describes Morgan Dixon's "Prefab" -- imagine how powerful a window manager would be if it could do all that stuff, fully programmable from JavaScript, in combination with full access to the Accessibility APIs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520967

Morgan Dixon's work is truly breathtaking and eye opening, and I would love for that to be a core part of a scriptable hybrid Screen Scraping / Accessibility API approach.

Screen scraping techniques are very powerful, but have limitations. Accessibility APIs are very powerful, but have different limitations. But using both approaches together, screencasting and re-composing visual elements, and tightly integrating it with JavaScript, enables a much wider and interesting range of possibilities.

Think of it like augmented reality for virtualizing desktop user interfaces. The beauty of Morgan's Prefab is how it works across different platforms and web browsers, over virtual desktops, and how it can control, sample, measure, modify, augment and recompose guis of existing unmodified applications, even dynamic language translation, so they're much more accessible and easier to use!