Show HN: Inspiration to your desktop background – Powered by RubyMotion
itunes.apple.comHey Jonas: interesting app. I can't use a white desktop background, though.
As probably most of the people here at HN, I often spend 12+ hours per day around screens, so anything that contributes to my eyes getting more tired is a bad idea. White really isn't the way to go.
Perhaps adding the possibility to choose a hex color for the background, or making the app add the quotes to the user's existing background is where you should go next. Best of luck with sales.
I agree, you definitely need to be able to change colors. Even better if you could overlay an image.
Thanks guys, that's great feedback! I'll add choice of colour in the next version.
Yes, I would buy if you could change background colors.
You can do this better with Geektool/Nerdtool, that way it'll be an overlay of your actual desktop background (so you can have things other than plain white) and you can of course supply your own quotes.
$ /usr/local/plan9/bin/fortune
Don't look back -- something may be gaining on you. -Satchel Paige.Interesting! Thanks!
it could be a little nice free app. Doesn't look like something I can pay $2.99 for. (don't tell me that I already pay $5 for coffee)
Interesting, just this morning I wrote a python script using https://github.com/alloy/terminal-notifier and https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pync to do something similar, except by sending OS X notifications to myself. I made some resolutions recently and I needed to remind myself of them regularly so I'd stick to them. So my 'app' chooses one from a list (randomly) and every 1-3 hours (randomly) sends a notification.
Nice idea. How's it working for you?
Pretty good but it's only been one day.
I started by copying these out by hand every morning. It sounds cheesy, but it does give me the chance to reflect on them which may work better in the long run.
Or I could keep both strategies. It's stuff like "Get up if you don't feel like working. Don't guilt yourself into trying to work." so it does help if I can see it in the middle of the workday.
Actually, wouldn't it be possible to make a web app to trigger that? https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...
Possibly. It might depend on users registering to receive notifications via Safari, though I'm not sure about this.
No thanks, I'll stick to those crappy posters that say "Achievement" or "Creativity". Or maybe the cat hanging off the branch.
I've never before seen someone try and monetise a MOTD feature.
Before any flame war starts, I'd like to say that my comment below is not meant to be offensive.
This type of thing would only happen in the OSX app store. It's interesting what a market will pay for depending on where/who you're selling to.
I was just thinking that given osx desktop background already has a feature to cycle through a directory of images, if you have imagemagick and curl then to do something that generates backgrounds from online MOTD services could be done in one line of bash.
That sounds like a fun experiment :) I can confirm that people are willing to pay for simple apps that has a positive impact on their life.
How would you solve choosing the right font size though? It should be such that the longest line perfectly fits the width.
generate an imagemagick text label at a certain font size, then pipe it to identify -size , pull the width out of that and then use the result to calculate the required font size which you then use in a second textlabel
edit - or just generate a large text label to start with, then scale it to whatever is required