Show HN: Morning, a minimal dashboard app for iPad | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Morning, a minimal dashboard app for iPad

tamper.io

110 pointsjeffd78 comments

Nice app! Can't wait for the iPhone version :)

It looks like you're using Paperfold (https://www.cocoacontrols.com/controls/paperfold). Mind adding it to the list of apps that use it on Cocoa Controls?

Also, I'd love to know if you use any other OSS components. I'm always looking for apps to highlight as my 'app of the week'.

Sure I'll add it to the list.

How have I not heard about cocoacontrols.com until now? Many thanks for excellent site!

Thanks, and you're welcome :)

You run Cocoa Controls? Thanks for creating such a great resource!

I do! Glad you like it :)

Cant wait for droid!

Am I the only one who sees a linguistic significance between "buy in the app store" and "download in the app store?" I've always felt as though the latter implied that the product was free. The act of downloading doesn't necessitate relinquishing money, so I tend to think that "purchasing" is a more appropriate verb when linking to paid apps.

"Downloading" is a fairly specific verb that generally doesn't involve money, which is why it feels so jarring when I see it used in relation to making a purchase.

Does anyone else feel as though "purchase" would be a more appropriate verb for their copy?

I hate not having any other comment to make but I think you would benefit from trying to optimise the size of the main banner image [1]. It's currently clocking in at just under 800KB, and loading it was like downloading an image on dial-up on my very reasonable 30Mbps. Even after reloading a few times it took me 16.8 seconds to download.

Good luck with your app and congratulations on shipping.

[1] http://images.tamper.io/morning/img/largebg.png

Yeah we should fix that ...

I've fixed that now! Sorry about the slow load times.

"Requires iOS 6.0 or later" - one of my least favourite phrases. I'm curious - what specific features require iOS 6? Why is so much iOS software backwards-incompatible?

Developers writing new apps see two things:

- High adoption rate of iOS6

- Cool iOS6 APIs (Autolayout, UIKit attributed text, indexed subscripting, etc)

and they decide to write for iOS6 only. They could support iOS 5, but the work is not worth the reward with the adoption rate of iOS6 being as high as it is.

For developers with existing customers, it is a different story.

Even if you're not explicitly taking advantage of new platform, supporting iOS 5 increases your testing burden. For an indie dev (or a pair of developers), this can be a significant burden for minimal payoff, given how few users are on older versions of iOS.

Indexed subscripting is available down to iOS 4.x I think — definitely available on iOS 5. It's a compiler technology, not related to the SDK.

No, declaring literals is a compiler technology that works with any SDK.

Subscripting requires runtime support in the form of `-[NSDictionary objectForKeyedSubscript:]` and pals , available only in iOS6 and above:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/cocoa/r...:

Thank you for the correction — I was thinking of ARC and weak references when I made that comment.

Actually, I stand corrected, indexed subscripting works back to iOS 5:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/Object...

The Reminders and Events panels both use EventKit which only added reminders support in iOS 6. Also the high adoption rate of iOS 6 makes it not worth while to support older versions.

I've spent many hours on other applications, mostly Mac, where the time spent making something backwards compatible was never really worth it. Example: I worked on getting fancy animations in an app that had to support Panther, which didn't even have NSAnimation support. However at this time Leopard had just came out and had all the new Core Animation hotness. Needless to say I would have saved countless hours if I didn't try back porting new features to older OSes no longer supported by Apple.

Thanks for the answer - I fully appreciate what you say. I'm just a bitter iPad1 owner whose £400 toy became obsolete barely a year after purchase. It's a shame there isn't a native equivalent of progressive enhancement.

I feel your pain, I too have an iPad 1 that I'd like to use more things on, like dashboards. :-P

I guess this is just what we get when we buy Apple products. They are damn good at making last year's awesome product look obsolete the next year.

To be fair the iPad shipped with iOS 3.2 and has seen upgrades through 4.x and 5.x. My iPad 1 from 2010 saw a good few years of use, rather than just barely a year.

Did you guys have trouble getting the app approved via app store? I read that Apple sometimes reject dashboard type apps.

I was very worried too, but we had no trouble getting approved.

Why do they reject dashboard apps?

Love the look.

Without having a chance to download it yet, how does the to-do list part work? Is it pulling a to-do list from one of my current to-do list apps, or do I need to create another one for this?

Any future chance for support for a Twitter feed or possibly an RSS feed?

Am I the only one that wished this is what the iOS 7 lock screen looks like?

The to-do part is pulling them in from iOS' built in Reminders app. That means you don't have to have yet another to-do app and it syncs via iCloud to your Mac and other devices.

The same goes for the events/calendar panel. They are both using Apple's EventKit API.

The news panel supports RSS feeds and Twitter is a possible option in the future, I'll look into doing it.

It would be great if the ycombinator RSS feed worked. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

I really like the idea and I will be checking this out, particularly since I have a long-ish commute to the office.

I will say, though, that I think for the way my morning routine tends to go, it would be more useful to me as a Mac app. I almost always look at my MBP in the mornings before leaving for work, but rarely make a point of checking my iPad, so I could see this being really useful for me as a full-screen Mac app, where I can just leave it running on a space. Any plans in that direction? :)

I've thought about a Mac app version of it, just haven't had the time to mock it up and prototype it. I can you keep you posted on that front, but the next thing on the list is iPhone support.

I'd be interested in a Mac app as well. I just signed up for the iPhone mailing list :)

even better - possibly a Chrome app that comes up when you open a new page. Similar to the Currently Chrome app.

If you wanted it to persist on a display, you could always airplay an iPad to a tv screen.

Nice!

I wake up every day around 5:30am and try to get up and going as quickly as I can.

You nailed some of the key things I already do in the morning: - check the weather - figure out what meetings I have for the day

The other thing I look for is if there was anything interesting for me that happened while I was sleeping. The best example is how I check to see if there are emails from specific people or internal monitoring services.

I could give you about 10 email addresses that I care about and get a digest of emails just from those email address.

Interesting idea. Are you thinking something along the lines of Mail.app's VIP feature where certain e-mails are propagated to the top or are you just talking about the content of mailing lists you subscribe to?

Similar to how the VIP feature works but in the consolidated view that you've created. I want to see everything in one place.

It's too easy to get distracted by other emails once I open Mail.app or, in my case, Mailbox.

Alright cool. I'll add it to the list of things to look into doing. :-)

If it were me, I'd offer an option to see just new e-mails into the VIP box, or all mailboxes.

Very nice.

I would love to have an API I could push information to. If I could have our systems send dashboard updates it could alert me to system issues. That would /own/.

This looks pretty sweet!

Just one question:

Was there any particular reason for the limiting of color schemes? Why not just show the user a color wheel and let them choose whatever they want?

No particular reason. Mostly just time, I want to get a color picker like that in there someday.

Ah, got it. Looks great! Looking forward to the next version update.

Traffic doesn't seem to be enabled for me. It's very sparse on information. I'd like to be able to configure other "feeds"

Tap on a panel and select the right circle. It'll give you more panels to choose from.

I was just discussing personal dashboards last Friday specifically I was looking for something to run on a Pi. Probably a web dashboard. I didn't really find anything (Kipfolio seems to be the business one) so I ended up registerding some domains. I was thinking of exploring it as my Startup Engineering project.

Best of luck with Morning!

Small world, I just started an empty GitHub repository last Friday to build a dashboard to run on my pi.

I had some fantastic luck setting up custom dashboards with Dashing from Shopify.

http://shopify.github.io/dashing/

Great link. Thanks!

Gonna need to start learning ruby.

Can I ask who your weather forecast provider is? The only one I bother using in the UK is the BBC or Met Office

Forecast.io, They are awesome!

Hi - would be useful if I could have two instance of the weather app and be able to specify locations. Add to that a tile with flight status - ideally tied in to flightstats/flightaware/triptracker, or even better, my airlines based on frequent flyer logins

Multiple weather panels will be available in an update. We had it enabled in beta versions, but it could get confusing so we only allowed one for 1.0.

The flight tracker idea is a good one, I'll look into it. Thanks!

Looks nice and I really like the site design! Anyone know of a similar blog design template?

Would be great if commute could be either public transport or by bike - I don't have a car, which in Denmark isn't very uncommon for city people. Otherwise great app - now I just need a way for it to be on my TV when i eat breakfast :D

I live in a city too and don't have a car. I plan on adding public transit support soon, because I really want it too.

Walking estimates too? Actually... I mean, I know how long it takes me to walk to work, but it'd be good to just be able to punch a number in. (Maybe automatically multiply by 1.1 or 1.2 when it's raining).

I guess there are a lot of things you could factor in for walking, but an average speed would probably get a close estimate in most cases.

AirPlay Mirroring with Apple TV? That should do the trick!

A Raspberry Pi with RaspBMC has AirPlay support as well, and is a bit cheaper/more functional then an Apple TV ;)

Initial comments...I'd like to be able to add the weather app twice, and specify locations not just 'my location' (I commute NY/Chicago

Next, stocks app gives no indication of time of change... 1 day?

Great idea, had high hopes but so far, not quite there

Multiple weather panels will be allowed in a future update. We removed them for the launch. Stocks will also get better.

Sorry that it's not there yet, but hopefully we'll do a better job with a few more iterations and refinements.

This reminds me a lot of windows live tiles, but in an app. I think the concept is great, but it would be better if this could somehow integrated into the lock screen.

I'm not an iOS user, but I agree. This reminded me of the sort of one-screen dashboard I get from my Windows Phone home and Surface start menu.

It looks really clean and professionally designed. Bravo to the OP for a job very well done.

Not being an iOS user, I'm not sure how readily you can extend the lock screen, but I agree with joeblau. It's really handy to have a subset of these data points on the lock-screen. I'd like to have TSLA right there before I even swipe the lock screen away. :) That's not possible (to my knowledge) on Windows.

What a great idea. Nice looking app

Do you happen to work on an android version, or is that simply too much work?

We are mainly Mac and iOS guys and probably wouldn't be able to do an Android tablet version as well, since we don't use the platform. And yeah, making the iOS version was enough work as is.

For something similar on Android, the Google Now home screen widget has some of the same functionality and (presumably) philosophy, albeit with a more minimal design.

Google Now is basically the same idea, but even more interesting/extensible. Maybe not quite as "Morning" oriented UX-wise, but it satisfies the same needs for me. I can look at it in the morning and see the weather, commute time, tasks, calendar events, etc on a dashboard. Works great!

I remember seeing a mockup of this on Dribbble a while back. Is the result?

Yes it is! Chris and I have been working on this for the past few months since that Dribbble post. http://dribbble.com/shots/780188-Morning

Awesome, great work. I was hoping this would become a reality.

Thanks! Happy to hear people like it.

Great work guys! Have a timeline for iPhone support?

We plan to make it a universal app sometime in the near future. We just wanted to focus on making it great on the iPad first, where we thought the concept worked best.

Very nice!

so basically they are trying to copy the flat design of Windows 8

Nice!

Nice.

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