I recently switched from a Fedora/GNOME laptop to a MacBook Air. My old setup served me well as a portable workstation, but I’ve started traveling more while working remotely and needed something with similar performance but better battery life. The main thing I missed was a simple taskbar that shows the windows in the current workspace instead of a Dock that mixes everything together.
I built boringBar so I would not have to use the Dock. It shows only the windows in the current Space, lets you switch Spaces by scrolling on the bar, and adds a desktop switcher so you can jump directly to any Space. You can also hide the system Dock, pin apps, preview windows with thumbnails, and launch apps from a searchable menu (I keep Spotlight disabled because for some reason it uses a lot of system resources on my machine).
I’ve been dogfooding it for a few months now, and it finally felt polished enough to share.
It’s for people who like macOS but want window management to feel a bit more like GNOME, Windows, or a traditional taskbar. It’s also for people like me who wanted an easier transition to macOS, especially now that Windows feels increasingly user-hostile.
I’d love feedback on the UX, bugs, and whether this solves the same Dock/Spaces pain for anyone else.
P.S. It might also appeal to people who feel nostalgic for the GNOME 2 desktop of yore. I started my Linux journey with it, and boringBar brings back some of that feeling for me.
A subscription for a menu bar, though, kills it for me. I have apps on Macs that are over 20 years old. Some of those companies don’t exist anymore. I’m not going to risk paying $100 for a decade of your app and hope that your company, or your goodwill, stays around that long.
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OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app
It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later.
For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing.
A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about it. I still care a lot about long-term maintenance for an app like this, but I think this is a better balance.
My thinking is pretty simple: most people will probably choose the basic 2-device plan, which works out to about $0.85 per month. For an app like this, I think that is a reasonable price.
Another reason is that a lot of Mac apps charge a one-time fee upfront, but then require paid upgrades later. In practice, that often ends up being similar to paying for a few years of ongoing support anyway.
I also think a low-cost subscription sets a clearer expectation that the app will continue to be maintained and kept working as macOS changes. For software like this, where OS updates can easily break things, that felt like the more honest model.
> For an app like this, I think that’s a reasonable price.
Except that it’s not a price, it’s an access fee, and those are very different. If it were a price I’d have the thing I paid for — a binary to use as a like. Instead what I have is a token that you can revoke at any time for any reason, including you getting hit by a car or getting bored with the app.
> a low-cost subscription sets a clearer expectation that the app will continue to be maintained …
Forgive the bluntness, but it does no such thing. This app just launched. No one has reason to believe the little business behind it will still exist in 12 months. Death rate for products like this is very high. A subscription from me is a bet that you will still be around in a year, and you have zero track record.
I've taken the feedback here and added a perpetual personal license for 2 devices at $40 - it includes 2 years of updates and the app will keep on working after that.
I just hate managing subscriptions.
If you gave me the option to require manual subscription renewal, rather than auto-renewal, I would 100% buy this right now. Basically allow me to purchase for 1 year then click a button to confirm that I'm still getting value out of the product. If I don't click that button then you should assume I'm no longer interested and cancel my subscription.
(I don't like using my mac but sometimes I have to use it for work, and I wish I had this.)
Consumer purchase behavior is highly impulsive and irrational. Businesses are very rational and like subs, but for many people, subscription fatigue is a real thing. Make the lifetime option 3-10x the annual rate; done. People will buy it. In my app I set it at 3x (but my annual sub is quite high; 6/mo, 30/y or 100 lifetime) but other apps, like Halide, have 12/y or 80 lifetime last I checked.
You get guaranteed revenue, and you get it upfront - better for cashflow. And you can always tell customers “if you don’t like subs buy the lifetime option”.
This is correct. It’s quite possible to both satisfy more customers and work within your constraints.
Eg $30 bucks lifetime would be nice. You could put it in small print below the main pricing to avoid decision fatigue and keep things streamlined for subs.
Often those early adopters appreciate and become advocates. Subs fatigue is a real thing
Low cost subscriptions as the only options can also give multiple vibes as well. The one you highighlight is, a somewhat optimistic, "the publisher is fair with this price and I only need to pay for however much I actually use".
Another valid takeaway is basically the opposite "It's not clear if the publisher is committed to this software. The price is so low and the best guarantee they want to give is it'll be supported 1 year from now - are they really confident in the product"? Worse yet, you don't give any guarantees about price more than an hour out in your current subscription, so the pessimistic thought could just be "It's fair enough now but do I really want to get used to it for a year and then the price is jacked up by then?" (this can be solved with more than a non-subscription option. E.g. longer term subscriptions, only if you truly are trying to advertise "years of support to come" rather than "support for the next year and then we'll see").
Even in the case one wants to start/stick with the subscription having a lifetime and/or versioned option only adds more to all of the things you listed as reasons for offering a subscription alone. E.g. seeing that "lifetime is equal to at least x years" or "y year term subscription" and then the user going with the 1 year subscription is strictly better signaling to them than just having a 1 year subscription.
The only thing suspicious from your comment is the current subscription option is 1 year, the ask was for longer/perpetual options, and the justification given was the price per month seems great. Other than the absolute value of the price per month is lower and sounds easier to defend, there doesn't seem to be anything about your product, the subscription for it, or the context made the cost per month the relevant interval for a user to consider the value.
Not people who are outraged by that concept.
But the main reason I wouldn't install it despite being happy customizing linux is that it's yet another black box I need to trust and that knows way too much. It's really insane how much you need to compromise your security on macos to have a decent developer experience.
It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later.
For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing.
A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about it. I still care a lot about long-term maintenance for an app like this, but I think this is a better balance.
Subscription is a big nope here, though. Especially for Mac software, I'd expect something where you pay for one major version, that is guaranteed to works on specific macOS versions, and gets minor bugfix updates too. But maybe the next macOS version requires a newer major version update to run, in which case you pay an upgrade fee to buy the next major version - or maybe the next major version has new features you might want to upgrade to as well.
My old Macs are stuck on 10.13, and I see Ubar mentioned elsewhere in this thread and that it's still compatible with 10.13. I might consider the $30 one off price to buy Ubar and keep it forever, but I wouldn't do a $10 subscription.
OP, go with the JetBrains model. You can still offer a monthly subscription, but also provide an annual option where you pay up front for a year. After that year, it reverts to a fallback license for the specific version that was current during that period. It’s a good approach.
It's a subscription with extra steps and worse retention.
I personally dislike subscriptions to the point where I’d gladly pay more to own, and as this thread shows, I’m not alone.
So why not offer both?
Some people will take the subscription with extra steps and worse retention and I'm saying the product will be worse off for it. Why not just offer the thing with the simpler messaging*, better retention, and better outlook for actually being supported down the road even if it's not a massive success?
* 1 year = 365 days, not when a new major version is subjectively justified
Honestly anyone who'd over index on people claiming they'd pay except $10 a year is just too much for a major utility or subscriptions are just too exotic for them is doomed unless they learn about conversion rates: I don't get the vibe OP is unaware though based on their comments here.
$10 is too low for a one-off purchase as well, I'm not saying to lowball the price. $29 for a small utility could be reasonable, and that gives you some room to offer discount pricing / sales if you want. As for major version upgrades, I'd be imagining a typical 50% off, $15 to buy an upgrade to v2 if the customer wants it. Of course, not every customer will want that.
You could offer both a subscription and a one-off purchase. It might put off some customers that you're even offering a subscription, but at least then you're offering everyone what they might want. And if you offer both, you'll have real data on what customers actually prefer, if you don't have that data already.
And as others have said - it's their business, they can choose their sales model! Offered only as a friendly suggestion and potential customer feedback.
Regardless of the presentation, $10 a year presumably represents what they want per user, per year, for this to be worth it for them. Don't rush to repackage that very conservative target into a 2nd format for people who won't pay $10 a year for a thing they'll use daily on a Mac in the first place.
> Offered only as a friendly suggestion and potential customer feedback.
And "please don't overindex on that comment OP" is offering an unreasonable response?
Not at all! Apologies if tone isn't coming through as I wanted. Good to have a contrarian view presented. Maybe a subscription really is what their particular market wants.
But I also understand I’m not the target audience for this, and some of my coworkers that wanted a Mac because “it’s a Mac” and now compare everything to Windows would probably use it. I’ll just have to feel bad for their wallets.
Q&A section doesn't explain what happens when the subscription is no longer active, but the app is still installed. What happens when the app manufacturer goes out of business? Does the app continue to work?
The subscription is a tell sign of an egoisticBar. A real boringBar wouldn't do that to its users.
Over the years, I've tried several of these dock replacement apps. The one that stuck the longest was uBar (which I used with a setup similar to what you have here, emulating a "windows taskbar".
I've hit issues with most of them that forced me to move back to the normal Dock, but the number one issue has always been around notification badges: they always seemed to break in strange ways.
For example, can your dock show badges for iMessage if the app isn't open? Does it get the updated badge count without me opening it? Say I receive a SMS/iMessage, does it instantly show a counter next to the unopened pinned messages app? None of the other apps successfully did this when I tried them...
I don't know if there are other apps like this, but iMessage was by far the biggest offender. Perhaps system settings too?
P.S.: Congrats on the launch :)
P.P.S.: As others have said, I think a subscription for this will rub many people the wrong way (I am one of them). If I'm paying for a subscription, I expect this to be pretty bug-free and have at least monthly updates. I wouldn't ask this of other subscription-based apps, but for one that replaces a system-level component and wants me to keep paying, you bet I am holding it to a high standard! I've wasted too much money on other replacements and gotten very little value out of that.
I expected some pushback on subscriptions, but after trying uBar and running into quite a few issues with it I wanted to build something that feels reliable and polished. I’m pretty much all-in on the Apple ecosystem now, even though I only switched ~6 months ago. My intention is to keep supporting boringBar regularly, as I use it every day myself.
Having failed that, I'd look into trying to inspect (if possible, even we have to disable SIP) the dock itself. Have it do the work for us and read out its badges.
(Throwing random ideas out there, I'm sure you've thought of this)
We really have entered the age of everything being a subscription.
The good news is someone definitely will (or perhaps already has) done this without one.
so i hacked together https://dockshortcut.com really quick and that kinda made the difference in how some people use their macbooks these days, but tough market, nobody likes paying for something that should come out of the box
you should probably reconsider asking for a subscription, people barely wanna pay once, even if it would save them weeks a year
I'm tend to think of it as a server os with a DE, but as a backend developer I'm probably biased.
To me, GNOME and Pantheon (elementaryOS DE) strongly resemble e.g. iPadOS or Android running on a tablet for a few reasons:
- Chunky heavily padded touch-optimized UI elements (even when no touch capability is present)
- By default, minimize button not present in titlebars
- Near total abandonment of menubars in favor of mobile-style "hamburger" menus
- By default, no desktop icons (not even an app grid!)
- Simplistic ecosystem apps with mobile-like philosophy of eschewing functionality that doesn't fit in toolbars and hamburger menus
- Little to no presence of progressive disclosure (enabling power user functions to be present without falling in the path of novices and tripping them up)
- Limited extensibility and scriptability (more so than macOS in some ways), with what exists (GNOME extensions) being fragile and breaking constantly due to needing to monkeypatch UI code
While it's not my cup of tea, KDE and even less trendy DEs like XFCE do a better job at acting like an actual desktop environment and surfacing the capabilities of the system.
Granted, it will not integrate with anything hardware-wise by itself (unless there's a package for it - if not, macOS still handles it, and Aqua/Quartz will keep running in the background anyway), but if what you wanted was something that is KDE or GNOME running with its own WM on its own X11 server, doing the exact same thing you'd get if you're running a Linux distro, that's been natively possible for over 15 years.
If a power user loses their power based on what GUI happens to be in front of them, how much of a power user was the power user to begin with?
Also tablet OS? Gnome is keyboard driven with tiling features OOTB...
Being keyboard-driven is nice but doesn't make up for these things, and these days macOS comes with Aero-Snap-like tiling built in too.
You could even require paying for “upgrades” for major updates in the future. (Similar to that of Sketch or some apps made by Panic)
I think you're actually likely to make more money that way because people will pass on adding yet another subscription to the pile they have already.
Good luck!
and https://noteifyapp.com/activedock/, which is less extreme but has a start menu-like launcher option
Both have one-time/lifetime purchase options. Taskbar is $25 one-time with a free but expiring older version. ActiveDock's one-time prices are $15 (1 year of updates, but usable forever) and $60 (lifetime updates).
Once it's set up, though, it's pretty rock solid.
Does anybody really use the dock as a an app switcher? MacOS is built around shortcuts, alt-tab, show spaces, etc. The dock is there for starting apps – which you can also do via spotlight, and as a “favorites” list after you remove all the built-ins.
Slightly related but AltTab is also a nice window switcher with built-in thumbnail previews if you prefer being able to tab by "window" and not by "process" (aka more like Windows).
The screenshots on the website look nice though.
Plus, I‘d prefer to (but that’s impossible?) install via the App Store, to avoid a black box.
nobody's paying a subscription for a taskbar. The business model here is a one time sale.
Fucking omega lol. April fools was 11 days ago my man. Charge me $50 if you want but absolutely fuck subscriptions.
C’mon, man, there’s not even a backend to support. Want more revenue next year? Release a new version that’s a compelling upgrade.
Edit: Ok, feedback. Please know that I'm a junky for independent Mac apps that I find interesting. This is interesting to me.
This feedback is entirely meant to be constructive. I like the app so far and I want it to succeed. Also, as someone who is deeply familiar with the platform and the third-party software ecosystem, my hope is that I can help communicate the things that would make if feel intuitively correct to a majority of Mac users. What I mean is that I'm a nerd who thinks a lot about the platform and the choices devs make that are nuanced and subtle. I hope you find it useful.
1. Practically invisible on a background that's dark / black. The photo on my desktop background is black at the bottom and this thing is therefore invisible. I don't know the best way to address that. Maybe it should sample the colors behind it and default to a light mode at first launch?
2. Frosted glass only changed one tab / chip (the active focus one) and the rest remained black and invisible. Not sure if that's deliberate or not. I expected the whole thing to change. I do see that window thumbnails are now frosted (didn't try thumbnails before toggling).
3. Needs kbd nav. I hovered to get thumbnails and tried arrow keys. No effect.
4. Thumbnail selections would benefit from a border or other visual indicator. Having only traffic light window controls to show which is active isn't sufficient.
5. As I continue to poke around, disabling frosted glass to view thumbnails in dark mode didn't change the glass background for thumbnails. Again, I didn't check thumbnails before switching frosted glass on. I don't know if that's supposed to work that way or not. Seems wrong to me, but I don't know the intent.
6. Delay for hover to invoke tooltips or thumbnails is too long. It feels sluggish. However, the snappy responsive drawing of new content when sliding from one app's thumbnails to another is very nice and impressive. It'd be easy for that to suck, so well done.
7. Time opening / drawing the app menu after first click is too long. I have a bajillion (394) apps installed, might be why. Should be as fast as clicking the Apple Menu regardless of how many apps need to be listed. Wait, now I just clicked it again to check if it is faster after the first time. Looks like the app cached whatever info it had to pull the first time cause it's properly snappy. Maybe pre-fetch that info on first launch so it isn't slow on the first click.
8. The thumbnails for minimized browser windows are awesome! Much nicer than using the thumbnails from Dock windows / tiles. I like that so much that I would consider working this into my workflow despite not needing it otherwise. I probably wouldn't do so, but I like it a lot.
9. The desktop / spaces switcher should probably also have thumbnails showing the content of each space.
10. There should be a toggle that closes a window from the thumbnails. I see that right-click has an option to do so, but there should be a left-clickable toggle in one of the corners. I'm gonna go against typical MacOS idioms and recommend experimenting with putting that toggle at the bottom of the thumbnail because they're so tall relative to the taskbar height. It might be wrong when you test it out. It's one of those things that I think either it feels right or it doesn't. My first instinct, however, is that it ought to be in the upper-left corner.
At the end of the day, I like it. I'm not the target audience, as mentioned above. But I know there are a lots of people who are the intended audience and I want them to have nice tools. I hope this makes some people happy. I'd be happy to provide additional feedback on a future build if the above is considered useful. Email in profile. Fingers crossed this doesn't come off as critical of the app. I like honest and direct feedback and I hope I haven't bummed you out cause that's not at all the intent.
1. That might be a good idea. Do you think adjusting the size of the bar from the settings makes it any better?
2. That seems like a bug. There's glass theme for Tahoe - but I think restarting boringBar might help here. I'll check it out.
3. Fair. I did not think of this use case.
4. Thumbnails have a blue hue for active windows as of now. Could you please let me know how this could work better?
5. Right now the Tahoe glass/frosted switch only works on the bar. A glass revamp is in the works for people who like the Liquid Glass design language.
6. I faced the opposite issue to this during my testing - the thumbnails opened up fairly quickly in my case. I'll take note of it and will fix it in later versions.
7. Correct - first time is slower because of the excessively large number of apps. I'll try to reproduce this.
9. Good idea. Will implement this as well.
10. If you hover on the thumbnail window the close and minimize buttons will show up. Are you talking about the ability to quit the app and all of its windows entirely?
2. Still holds after multiple relaunches. Strange.
3. Cool. Looking forward to it!
4. I guess my system is causing multiple GUI bugs to present. I don't see a blue highlight when I mouse-over thumbnails.
10. Oh, I'm a dope. I even referenced the traffic light controls earlier in the comment. It somehow sailed over my head that the thing I was asking for was right there. Just tried it and it worked. However, I closed the only open window for an app and that thumbnail remained after the window was gone and the app had exited. That doesn't seem correct to me. But yes it's implemented and I got stupid for a moment while poking around.
One other thing that I noticed after exiting the app was that all the windows that had been minimized to the Dock were no longer minimized. That's a tiny papercut. Minimizing windows is a form of window management and everything got reset. Not the end of the world, but unexpected and mildly disrupting.