Show HN: MonkeyMind – A shortcut-driven to-do list for your Mac's menu bar | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MonkeyMind – A shortcut-driven to-do list for your Mac's menu bar

apps.apple.com

99 pointsstartingpoint51 comments

Open articleView on HN

Congrats on launching!

I have to say, though, this looks uncannily like my own app, Remember, that I launched a few months ago:

* https://remember.defn.io/

* https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/remember-quick-reminders/id149...

* https://github.com/bogdanp/remember

Right down to the key bindings and some of the marketing copy[1].

[1]: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/remember-6

Remember looks great.

> This application is not Open Source. I'm providing the source code here because I want users to be able to see the code they're running and even change and build it for themselves if they want to. In that vein, you're free to read, build and run the application yourself, on your own devices, but please don't share any built artifacts with others.

Minor bit of feedback, it would be great to add a licence file to GitHub to expose this a bit more clearly and in a more standard way. I have no problem with this choice, but I can see some users missing this licence-esque bit of the README.

FWIW, in terms of user interface I think we’re all consciously or subconsciously inspired by the apps we use everyday such as Spotlight and Alfred.

For example, here’s my todo list menubar app launched many months before Remember: https://wip.chat/menubar

I bet other people will reply with similar looking apps launched months before mine :)

Yes, definitely. I was just struck by how close some of the similarities were in this case. That said, it is a simple enough class of app that there are bound to be similarities between them and I was sincere in congratulating the OP.

No affiliation with either of you. But, it does not look the same to me. The linked HN post is a simple MacOS top bar tool that shows my list of to-dos that may be activated by key bindings if I wish.

Yours looks more like the default Cmd+Space action - Spotlight available in MacOS.

I personally prefer the simplicity of the app that lives in the top bar as it comes with lower cognitive load by not needing to remember some keywords to summon your tool that is not in my active view.

Remember requires 10.15, according to my App Store. I bought one of the first thousand Mac 128k's, suffered through systems 1-9, bought dozens of Macs and clones since, and from what I've read I have no intentions of upgrading to 10.15 till I need to replace hardware.

Hey HN, Benedict the developer here.

I built MonkeyMind as a scratchpad for thoughts while in deep focus. Whenever something pops up in my mind, I needed a place to put it and get back to work.

Pen and paper can do the trick, but something with a Spotlight-like shortcut would be better.

And that is what MonkeyMind does. A simple global keyboard shortcut to add items and an app that lives in the menubar and gets out of your way.

Let me know what you think!

I really like the idea. However, the fact that I can only purchase it from the Mac App Store is a blocker for me, since I primarily use my work Mac, where I'm logged in w/ my work Apple ID. Seeing as there's no way to share or transfer apps between my work Apple account(s) and my personal Apple account, I'd have to buy two copies, which I don't want to do.

Benedict - this app looks awesome! Will install this when I get OS X reinstalled on my Mac!

I have been looking for something like this that keeps me out of apps while I am in code mode!

I really like the app but that monkey icon turns me off big time, allow me to not have the monkey and I'll buy it for sure.

Congrats on making this, it looks slick.

Would you consider adding sync functionality, so that the same list works on multiple machines?

Thanks for the kind words. Sync is definitely something I'm considering, but I can't promise any timelines.

It looks like there's a single 5-star review by "Benedict B." Did you review your own app?

I don’t have the answer to this, but giving your own app 5 stars seems totally reasonable and fair. It’s like voting, everyone has one vote, why on earth would you not vote yourself if you’re on the menu?

I think the small upside (a single 5-star rating contributes very little to app ranking) is outweighed by the potential downsides (it can be a turnoff if the user sees that because it strikes of astroturfing, which seems a hot topic these days; it violates app store guidelines, though there's a close to zero chance of that being enforced).

To me it seems like unnecessary risk for little benefit.

Edit: And product reviews are not the same as voting. :)

Cool. Downloaded and using it. Nit-pick but can you please have right-click to access the setting menu?

There used to be a dead-simple MacOS App called Anxiety that does something similar to this but it somehow died.

I don't use TO-DO Apps to do my tasks, I calendar pretty much everything but I want a very simple task-lister for things such as "Call Ram", "Remind Kid to learn to Type", etc.

This serves the purpose.

I tried Tot[1], another interesting simple tool to do a similar function but MonkeyMind is simpler for me to for these small tasks.

Feature Request: Can we make this have a Powerpack option for Alfred. So, I can keep this running in the background but use Alfred to add tasks. This is the same request I asked the Command-E[2] guys too.

1. https://apps.apple.com/in/app/tot/id1491071483?mt=12

2. https://getcommande.com

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad MonkeyMind is useful to you.

Quick question about the right-click: What exactly do you mean? Right click on the settings icon or anywhere in the list?

As for Alfred: it's probably simpler to just set up a separate keyboard shortcut for MonkeyMind.

I want to right-click on the icon and access the menu right away.

Alfred; Ok. Just wishing that I used just one single Keyboard Shortcut for both. I use Alfred very often, so if I can continue to use that and do something like -- CMD + Space > "MM Get a Haircut."

For Alfred powerpack users, there is a workflow for this. I use it all the time :)

https://github.com/surrealroad/alfred-reminders

Nice. I will check it out.

Quite a while back, I did away with all sorts of Clipboard app, after discovering Alfred's "Clipboard/Snippet Viewer".

I semi-frequently (like every other week) need something longer than 3 months ago. So I still have Paste running on Mac (unlimited history) and iOS. Plus Paste lets me add stuff via iOS sometimes that I want elsewhere. But yeah for normal purposes I use Alfred’s clipboard 95% of the time.

Tot it doesn’t seem like keyboard shortcuts work to go between the 8 or so diff notes? Hoping for things that are mostly just keyboard.

Thanks for the options.

TickTick has a nice "quick capture" experience too. Will try this.

-- edit --

This has a super reasonable price of 2.5 EUR in Brazil. I forget the term now but its of course a discount due to lower purchasing power.

How does Apple calculate that?

This is a much more polished version of what I do, which is to keep a note (in Notes app) called Brain Dump, and I jot down anything that is cluttering my mind, which I hold on for fear of forgetting. Just the act of writing it down helps; it's a reassurance that it's ok to let go of those thoughts because they are saved elsewhere.

What I like with MonkeyMind is the minimal amount of friction involved, as well as automatic timestamp.

I thought I was the only one.

I’ve had repetitious thoughts and originally thought they were repeating because there was some thing missing, some nuance that I hadn’t explored.

But once I would write them down, sometimes they would just go away. It must have been a fear of forgetting.

I had the same notes file, and a piece of paper where I would write stuff like that down. I'm glad you like it!

This is definitely something I need, thanks. One small feature request: Would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut to show the list too.

Great idea. What exactly would you do with that? Simply open up the list and look at the past entries?

I could see keyboard based navigation, e.g. press keyboard shortcut to pop open the menu bar list. Then navigate through them with the up/down arrows, press spacebar to toggle completion status, then hit escape to close the menubar list.

Exactly this. Arrow key navigation already works, so being able to open it with a shortcut, and hit enter or space to toggle would make this complete.

This is really nice good job.

I have one suggestion. It would be nice if this app can fetch data from reminders app of MacOS and put them in the menu bar along with the ones added.

I like that idea, but I also want to keep the user experience really simple. Would you want to display a single list from Reminders? Or show all reminders alongside?

And the other way around: would you add to Reminders from MonkeyMind?

Yes to adding to reminders from MM. Reminders syncs to mobile — that can be convenient!

Yes this looks like a good idea. But i wanted the reminders also to be able to display in that quick toolbar rather opening another app(Reminders). It would be nice to merge them and show or choose a list that we wanted to show.

Awesome! Looks similar to a short-cut driven note taking tool I'm building - https://mmap.it

Major difference is mine is focused on longer form documentation and comes with an inline markdown editor. Congrats on the launch!

Should have named the app goldfish.

Damn, that's a great name too...

Looks slick, great job on launching!

Any possibility of a way to purchase outside of the AppStore? I appreciate this is extra effort for possibly little extra reach but I have managed to survive without signing into my icloud and hopefully won't ever.

Not as of right now. I am considering other distribution channels like Gumroad. Would that work for you?

That would be amazing. Feel free to update me using my email (in profile) if you want.

Damn I love this. I think I might save this for when I get a mac, but since I'm on Linux right now, I'm going to copy this idea with my rofl menu I think

Looks great, thank you for sharing!

A question I have about macOS development - where should I start in order to learn how to make menu bar and shortcut driven UIs?

Please, don't forget about the Dock!

I personally hate when apps crowd my Menu Bar when they don't need to e.g. Dropbox, NordVPN, Keybase etc. I always try to disable the Menu Bar icon for an app if possible, and if I can't I will delete the app if I can find a suitable alternative.

There are so many advantages to a dock icon:

- Richer, colorful icon

- Support for badges, configurable by user

- Won't be hidden by the system (macOS will hide icons in a crowded Menu Bar)

- Can be hidden by the user (Dock Autohide)

- Icon can be repositioned by the user

The Apple HIG makes it pretty clear that most apps don't need the Menu Bar, and should use the Dock instead. But we're in a vicious circle where users have been trained to use the Menu Bar (even though it's inferior), so that's what developers do.

Hadn't thought about that! Thank you for the remark, will definitely keep it in mind.

Ray Wenderlich has a nice basic tutorial around creating a simple menu bar application. I just used it for my own application and it seems well up-to-date. I thought it was this one: https://www.raywenderlich.com/450-menus-and-popovers-in-menu...

A global hotkey is not something I have experience with but it seems that there's a library called Hotkey: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47760135/global-keyboard...

That's pretty much the same place where I started as well (the RW tutorial). For the library: HotKey is exactly what I used. Simple to set up, works with the Xcode Package manager and does exactly what it says.

Cool, thank you both for the information!

Looks nice and slick will give it a try. Thanks for sharing Benedict :)

I would give up Todoist if I could view todos on my phone as well :)

Maybe I should consider adding sync and creating MonkeyMind for iOS as well...

Looks good. Checking it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com