Show HN: MeetingBar – A menu bar macOS app for calendar meetings | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MeetingBar – A menu bar macOS app for calendar meetings

github.com

131 pointsleits54 comments

Just want to mention bitbar[1]. Write anything to stdout, it'll make it show up in the menu bar.

Bitbar is amazing. Its become a dashboard for my life.

What sort of things do you display with it?

Not parent, but I have bitbar menus for ssh’ing to digitalocean boxes, connecting to corporate vpn, and displaying uptime information from uptimerobot.

Not OP as well but I love BitBar. I use it as a catch-all status and action menu at work. Here’s what I have:

- Display current git branch, useful for quickly looking up the task and task ID when I need to write it somewhere.

- Poll develop branch, parse and display the current sub module commit. Again for quick lookup when I need to reset that repo.

- A list of PRs and their status and ID (just open the menu to see the ID so I can easily find the relevant build in eg CI)

- A couple of bookmarks for usual websites to open

- A couple of bash scripts to delete certain folders

- A couple of shortcuts to open specific folders (eg snapshot folder)

- A simple HTTP status of a website I manage (it tended to break often, now I see if it is down within a minute)

Basically anything I do on a semi regular basis is literally one click away. I cannot recommend this tool enough.

Oh, this is perfect! It’s been annoying me for a while that the system menu bar clock in macOS doesn’t allow me to format the current date in ISO 8601 format.

Bitbar will solve this for me! I’ll change the system clock to only show the day of week and the time, and then I’ll use Bitbar in order to give me the ISO 8601 date in my menu bar! :D

Edit: Neat! Someone already made a plug-in for BitBar to do this so I don’t even have to spend any time writing anything at all. And look at that, they even thought about it one step further and made it so that you can copy the date to your clipboard by clicking on it! https://getbitbar.com/plugins/Time/date-picker.1m.sh

Edit 2: Initially copy to clipboard wasn’t working but I modified the script a little bit, removing the space before each bash= and putting single quotes around each $0 and now it works.

Edit 3: I submitted a PR for the above-mentioned change https://github.com/matryer/bitbar-plugins/pull/1471

Another good option for a fully customizable menubar clock is Itsycal, which as its name implies also serves as a small popup calendar that shows events from system calendar accounts.

https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/

I made something similar for myself, but my needs were to see local and UTC time, and to copy current unix timestamp and current ISO date-time string.

Also has some typographic trickery so the width of time shown is always constant, and doesn't "flicker" on the menu bar moving other icons by few pixels every minute.

Here it is in a gist: https://gist.github.com/erkiesken/e13943550c4b2ba03779d5eac5...

The author has been weirdly reluctant to support new OS features, but I've been using Day-O[1] for years, it has a customizable time format[2] that could easily do 8601

[1] https://shauninman.com/archive/2016/10/20/day_o_2_mac_menu_b... [2] https://shauninman.com/day-o/datetime.html

I didn't know about bitbar. I myself use textbar: http://richsomerfield.com/apps/textbar

I wish I knew about this as I paid for textbar.

I love bitbar, but I wish it can have separate processes/interface for each widget. I use Dozer, and everytime it updates all of the BitBar widgets gets hidden.

Is there a way to get Zoom / Meeting , or even just Calendar, on my BitBar?

Great - One thing Meeter does which is great (they are a commercial app that does something similar) is popup a notification with a 'join' button 2 minutes or so before the meeting starts. That reduces the interaction to one click rather than two.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meeter-for-zoom-teams-co/id151...

Yeah, really enjoying the Meeter app that comes with the SetApp bundle/subscription :)

We changed the URL from https://meetingbar.onrender.com/ to the GitHub page because the latter has more explanation.

Sorry, but can you return previous URL? The site is more user-friendly than github interface.

Given the audience, GitHub might be more user friendly :)

Usually we switch from Github URLs to the project's home page. But in this case there doesn't see to be any information, just a screenshot and links to download/install. HN readers tend to want more information than that.

I prefer the github url fwiw

Seems similar to https://apps.apple.com/us/app/next-meeting/id1017470484?mt=1... which I love and use every day.

Allows you to click on the events and open meet, zoom, etc.

This is super handy as it also works on older versions of macOS. Thanks a lot for sharing this gem!

Site: https://meetingbar.onrender.com/

I have a similar “me ware” app for Windows that I completely rely on. Integrates with outlook. Plan to add google calendar. It floats on top and gives a tiny graph of your day, with different colors for each half hour, float over it to see what meeting, click to open meeting, and it flashes and dances when meetingS approach. It saves me every day over and over. I must release it.

Would love to check it out!

This looks like a useful app that I've been looking for. That said, I replaced several individual applications I had been using with Hammerspoon Lua scripts, and had been planning on making my own for exactly this purpose as well. Perhaps it could be argued that Swift is more pleasant than Lua and that a calendar integration app is complex enough to warrant skipping Hammerspoon for this task?

Super cool. Anyone know if there is an equivalent in windows?

If you're signed into the "Calendar" app on Windows 10, you can see upcoming meetings by clicking on the time in the taskbar.

My friend and I made something for this recently which works as a google chrome extension: https://nextcall.xyz/

For anyone looking for more general menu bar calendar app that syncs with the macOS calendar, I can highly recommend Itsycal.

https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/

I just tried to install but it requires Catalina. As someone who is planning on staying on Mojave indefinitely to avoid the Catalina dumpster fire, would love MeetingBar to work with Mojave if it can be easily updated to do so!

Probably because it's built using SwiftUI

Same, while I understand the comfort and appeal of writing for the latest stack, I can't imagine upgrading to Catalina any time soon. If anything, I find it more likely that I might upgrade to Big Sur once it stabilizes.

Nice! I’ve been using a similar non-OSS tool called Up Next (https://ellen.li/up-next/). It works great but is not open source.

I have it installed but it doesn't tell me when the next meeting is. It's just showing a checkered flag icon. Is that because my next meeting is tomorrow?

A checkered flag is using in racing to indicate "Finished", which typically implies "done for the day" in calendaring contexts.

That makes a lot of sense! But I've never seen that metaphor in calendaring before. Thanks for the explanation.

Hey your app is included in the recommended set of apps for all the computers at my former place of employment.

Great idea, great app. You should consider making it a proper osx app on the appstore and selling it for a 2$. If you are interested and would love some help, let me know (https://sideproject-help.com)

Thanks, evliz! My app is completely opensource and free. I don't plan to make it paid.

You can have both. Why people will pay for the app when you can download it for free ? We will see it as a donation. I always start by using FLOSS and if I stick with the software for more than one year I send a donation. Having the app on a store is a way to achieve that. Thank you for choosing to open source the application it matters a lot for some of us.

If s/he wants donation, giving Apple a 30 percent cut is not the most efficient way to do it.

30%? Why Apple does even have a cut at all?

Looks Amazing, congrats. Can't install since I'm still using OSX Mojave :(

I can't seem to open it; I keep getting this message:

> “MeetingBar” can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.

> This software needs to be updated. Contact the developer for more information.

Both if I use brew or manually download it.

Apple isn't very friendly to software distributed outside of AppStore. For installing it you need to:

    Allow installing software outside of AppStore before installation
    Allow opening the app from Preferences after installation

Follow this official from Apple Support to do this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491c

This error occurs on default macOS when using software precompiled on another computer, when the person who compiled and released that software has not signed up for an Apple Developer account and submitted the precompiled bundle for notarization, one of Apple's anti-malware prevention mechanisms.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/notarizing_m...

You can usually work around it by right-clicking the app and choosing Open, which usually triggers a special approval dialog. You should generally use caution when doing so, as you're granting an arbitrary binary whose contents you are unlikely to verify access to your private data.

ps. Developers, automating this process as part of your releasing is relatively easy, assuming you have a paid Developer account. The shell script at this link is accompanied by a clear walkthrough, and can be adapted to most workflows run locally on a machine containing your signing keypair. (And if your precompiled binary or bundle was not built with Xcode, you would skip the “xcodebuild” step.)

https://scriptingosx.com/2019/09/notarize-a-command-line-too...

There was site someone made that automatically redirects to your next meeting. Does anyone remember what it was called?

(Update) found it: https://now.me/

Looks nice. I wish I could use it, but IT has the calendar locked down, and most of the solutions have too much friction to make them viable

Sounds like a nightmare.

I already using it.(from Product Hunt launch) Perfect fit for work-day routine especially on WFH.

Thanks for feedback, yarsanich!

Seems like this is meant for remote meetings, but it would be great for in office meetings too. I don't remember when so and so has scheduled anything unless it's really consistent, then I'm surprised in the middle of coding and look like a dick when I stay to finish my task before joining.

very nice!!

This is already in the notification pane on the rhs of the screen.

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