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Comment by trys | Hacker News Reader

Fair point, this is the beginnings of a basic hit counter that I'm working on. As there's no server (it's CDN hosted on Netlify), there's no way to see if anyone's even using the site. It's waaaaay less intrusive that GA, or other tracking tools. It's simply picking up page views - ignoring IP and any identifiable information (cookies obvs. included). It also respects do not tracking indicators in your browser. Tiny Tracking will be open sourced in time.

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In my mind, this completely contradicts "privacy centric" and "offline first", which to me are very important goals. Even though the notes in the app are only ever stored on my computer, and even though it's metadata being sent, I would rather offline and privacy focused apps not use my network at all. That's what I aspire to anyway when I write apps for sephware.com, and I wish everyone would do the same.

Your Autumn app looks pretty sweet by the way. I've been looking for a simple WM on Mac. The other ones are always needlessly complicated (looking at you Hammerspoon). Especially after using the beautifully minimal bspwm [1] + sxhkd on Linux for years.

But re: zero analytics, aren't you curious how many people use the app at a minimum?

[1] https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm

Yeah, I sometimes wonder about those statistics. But I'm not curious enough to invade people's privacy or use any of the other modern marketing manipulations to boost sales. I think if you make a thing and pour love into it, people will love using it, and maybe even want to give you a little money. I've seen this first hand many times and been on both sides of it. That's why I like Show HN, and give apps like JournalBook an honest look, especially when it's clearly a passion project by a single person.

Edit: Thanks for the bspwm link btw, I've been wanting to add a class to Autumn called TileWM (to complement the existing GridWM) but I couldn't wrap my head around binary space partitioning, although I knew that's what tiling WMs usually use. The page you linked to describes and visualizes it really well and now I think I understand it well enough to finally implement it. Although, given the nature of Autumn, someone could probably implement this feature sooner using Autumn itself :D

Just wanted to say — I’ve been using Autumn for about a week and it may just be the perfect window manager. And I’ve tried them all.

BST Hammerspoon Moom Flexiglass Layouts Alfred Div MaxSnap Spectacle Magnet SizeWell Etc etc

All of them. So thank you for the hard work.

And I can’t tell you how delighted I was to find THIS point of view from you out in the wild. Agreed entirely.

Really glad to hear that you enjoy my app that much! I put a ton of hard work into it and honestly yours is the first feedback I've heard about it at all, beside a close friend who beta tested it briefly. If you have any thoughts on features or APIs you'd like to see in Autumn, please don't hesitate to use the in-app Feedback form :) In particular, if you wouldn't mind sending me a copy of your current script, I'd love to see how you're using Autumn!

Have you checked out chunkwm[1]?

[1] https://koekeishiya.github.io/chunkwm/index.html

No I haven't yet, thanks for the link

I love the shoutout to yourself. Anyways, poking around your site and I appreciated this. Thanks for keeping it fun.

Make your windows dance in place! This is actually in the demo video up top, and I put it there because it's super fun, even though it's probably completely impractical. Try it out to get the full effect.

Thanks I appreciate it and glad you enjoyed the dancing windows as much as I did :)

Unfortunately you're still sending a lot of data across the wire, so even though your intentions are pure, you've still opened a door to immense data collection for an app that bills itself as "privacy centric". If you passed your data to a third party for storage (Netlify for instance), they could glean an immense amount of information.

Thanks for the reply. I figured it was, in reality, a pretty innocuous page view counter. But I also figured since your site is getting some attention on HN right now, it'd be best to make the finding public.

Also, thanks for actually adding a 'do not track' check! Too few sites are doing that, even new ones like yours. I updated my comment as soon as I saw that in there

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