Show HN: Mjolnir, an automation/productivity app for OS X | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mjolnir, an automation/productivity app for OS X

mjolnir.io

43 points_vya729 comments

Congratulations on releasing Mjolnir!

Here is some feedback: I have never heard of Mjolnir, or Hydra, before. I visited the page you linked and skimmed through. Here is what I learnt:

- That it's a "Lightweight automation and productivity power-tool for OS X"

- How to try it out

- How to uninstall it, or install it to $HOME

- How to install it's doc sets

- How to work with modules

- FAQ on some very technical questions

- Some high-level phylosophical comparison with other apps ("Mjolnir is more modularized, Slate is more all-in-one")

- Thanks, technical changes, license etc.

I still have no idea what is it, what problems could it solve and what are some typical examples of automation, apart from a single paragraph"start writing some fun staff" in "Try it out" section.

I'm certainly interested in automating tasks on my Mac, but after reading the landing page I have no idea what kinds of tasks it could be. Is it better that Automator? How does it compare? Is it better then writing shell scripts? etc.

If I were you, I would spend 70% of the page to explain what someone can accomplish with Mjolnir and why they should care, and 30% (or less) on the technical stuff. May be I'm not an intended audience.

Good points. I will work on improving the introduction of the landing page to explain this better.

To be honest, it's kind of hard to explain what Mjolnir can do, because really it's just a Lua environment. I wrote some Lua modules people can install that bridge over internal OS X APIs to do things like access windows and stuff. But really, the power lies in your imagination of what you want to automate, and Mjolnir just gives you the power to automate them.

Can't emphasize this stuff enough. What problems does it solve for the user? It's described in very general terms, which I'm going to assume is because it's a general-purpose tool that can solve many problems. Show some of them! Are they problems people already solve in a different way? Show why yours is better.

Thanks to both of you. I've updated the website now to include some things that help clarify some example use-cases. I hope it helps?

First and foremost: great job shipping it!

Regarding your question: I'd still love one (captivating) example, one 10s video to "pull me in" and convince me to install it. Looking forward to it.

Thanks!

I added some screenshots. They're more easily seen in the Github readme than on the website. (I really ought to change to a different Github-Pages theme.)

Thanks - it does help. So now I have a better understanding what it does - if I were to express my understanding in a single sentence, it would be something like "Mjolnir allows you to script Apple mouse events or system dialogs in Lua and assign them to a hotkey - no need to use Apple C API".

Again, if you target Mac power users (which is the right market you should probably target - much bigger than just developers), I would emphasize higher-level stuff you can do with Mjolnir and ease of use comparing to AppleScript.

For some inspiration, go to App Store and search for "Automator" - you'll see several bundles that help people automate programs like Adobe Illustrator, etc.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck!

Here is another idea/fun experiment: try to express your idea in:

- 5 words

- 1 sentence

- 1 paragraph

- 3 paragraphs

Adding constraints like that really help you focus on what's important. For example, does "Lightweight" section belong to the introduction, or is it an implementation detail? Should you move screenshots up on the page above the "fold line"? etc. etc.

Author here.

I'm very glad (and relieved!) to finally release this after several months of hard work and a ton of help from many very supportive and smart contributors. Mjolnir wouldn't be nearly as useful without their help!

I'd be happy to answer questions here.

Congrats on the release!

I've enjoyed a few of your other projects, and am currently happily using Phoenix. I look forward to trying Mjolnir in the near future.

I hope Mjolnir will be around for a while. I like your work, but redoing my setup each time is getting annoying. :)

Thanks!

Mjolnir is not quite the same as Hydra/Phoenix/Zephyros. Those were "window managers" and that's really all they do. Mjolnir is for general automation, although window managing can be part of that.

So if Phoenix is working for you, stick with it :)

I often write scripts using either Automator or Applescript and this looks much simpler to pick up. Does Mjolnir have the same functionality and access to app APIs that applescripts provide?

The core modules use Apple's Accessibility API to get access to other windows. AppleScript probably does the same thing internally. But using Mjolnir will have a different feel than using AppleScript.

Why do you remove the repo of Hydra?

I can't read that page at all (I'm rendering it in XFCE in debian, because I am broke and between Macs.)

to clarify, I can see that there is text, but it's so thin and faint on my crappy LCD that I'm getting a headache trying to read it. No, this doesn't happen on most sites.

Hmm that's weird. I'm using a canned Github-Pages theme on that site. You can read the exact same text on the official readme:

https://github.com/mjolnir-io/mjolnir

The colour (#777) makes it hard to read (at least for me). Having it in black (and font-size bumped to 16px) makes it way more readable

I'd bump the font size up a few notches and maybe go with #333 or #444 if you're just itching for gray text.

I was going to ask -- isn't this exactly like Hydra? But some Googling indicates it's the same project and was renamed. Explanation of the name change here:

http://sdegutis.github.io/2014/08/11/the-history-and-current...

It does similar things, and started off from Hydra's code-base. But it's design and architecture is so different that it's now a completely different app. Many Hydra modules can be ported, but they're not completely 1:1 compatible.

It's also written down in the FAQ section of the page. But I was thinking the same thing.

How does it compare to Amethyst [http://ianyh.com/amethyst/] ?

Amethyst is a window manager more like Slate. Mjolnir is an automation app that can do a lot of things, including window management.

Amethyst is a tiling window manager, mjolnir is an automation tool, which can be configured to be a window manager. Not sure if it can be configured to be a tiling one.

Just wrote a basic tiling window manager config based on amethyst: https://github.com/nathankot/dotfiles/blob/master/dotfiles/....

Half-baked, but it's smoother than amethyst for me :)

It'd be awesome if there were a brew cask formula for install/setup.

We experimented with that early on, but at the time `cask` didn't have any way to remove old versions when upgrading. This caused problems with the start-at-launch feature, which then launched several instances of the app. This may be fixed in newer versions of cask, though. If anyone gets around to it, send a PR :)

meow-meow?

According to #mjolnir it's actually pronounced "myur-myur"

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