/hn-notifier

A non-intrusive menu bar application to notify you when there is new post submitted to Hacker News

Primary LanguageSwiftMIT LicenseMIT

A notifier for latest submited post on Hacker News. It's a menubar item app for Mac OS X 10.9 and 10.10.

Motivation

I'm a big fan of Hacker News site, as I feel like it has the biggest density of posts with high quality on the internet. Every minute, people all over the world submit different posts covering different topics there, and a lot of them never shows up on front page simply because they were not posted at right time or they focus on a niche(yet interesting) topic.

I used to only check the HN front page as well, and sometimes only find that most top 10 or 20 posts are not that interesting to me. I want to have a easy way to checkout the NEW post whenever I have time, and it will only take my minimal time to see the whole picture, without doing too many mouse/keyboard operations.

So here you go, a menubar app to read what's the latest submitted posts on Hacker News, for Mac OS.

Usage

It periodically fetch the latest posts on Hacker News. The icon will be in grey color if there is no new post since your last reading, and the icon turns to colorful if there are new ones.

When you see icon turns to be colorful(orange), you can simply click on the icon to see what are the latest posts.

https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/534284/4026469/1a1aaa40-2c1a-11e4-91b1-4045f6a2af8a.png

If you happened to find one looks interesting, you can click on it, and the HN page of this post will be openned in your browser automatically. You can then either upvote it or leave comment.

Click your mouse again anywhere will make the post dialog disappear and the icon goes back to grey status.

Configuration

By default, hn-notifier sync with HN every 1 minute and grab at most 20 latest post. You can update both value by selecting option item in menu.

https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/534284/4026475/436f7506-2c1a-11e4-92e8-4f82ac6a5fff.png

Install

There will be binary release for each version. Simply go to Release page to grab the zip file and unzip it, then drag the app file into your Application folder.