
Show HN: A Pomodoro app for your menubar/tray - amitmerchant
https://github.com/amitmerchant1990/pomolectron
======
techwizrd
I feel bad for folks using Electron. As soon as they try to demonstrate their
hard work, the top comments are people vocally decrying Electron's resource
usage, not their app that they've spent a lot of effort on. It probably feels
very demoralizing when people instantly disregard your app due to Electron's
resource usage.

Electron is a very easy way to develop applications, and it's definitely doing
something right. I've written Gtk (my preference) and Qt for ages, and
developing stuff in Electron was mind-blowingly fast, trivial to debug, and
trivial to produce packaged binaries for multiple platforms. It's very
difficult to achieve a similar development experience with native toolkits,
and I think we'll continue seeing more Electron apps until native toolkits
offer a comparable development experience.

~~~
beardicus
> I feel bad for folks using Electron.

Me too, so I've started down voting such comments. At this point they are off
topic and distract from actual useful feedback.

OP: your app looks pretty nice. I'd suggest offering the choice of a more
muted tray icon (dark on light, and light on dark).

~~~
amitmerchant
Hi! Thanks for the feedback. I'll surely look into it.

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Ezhik
Electron... It's always so upsetting to see a tray widget require hundreds of
megabytes of RAM to run.

~~~
sdflkd
What is a less resource intensive but similarly easy to use tool that would
let you make desktop apps?

~~~
throwaway2016a
Qt is actually pretty easy to work with.

Really, though, I would prefer to use Electron. It would be great if they
could find a way for multiple electron apps to share a runtime so it would
save both memory and reduce the download size.

~~~
mattnewton
..like browser tabs? Obviously not the exact ui desired here, but an
extension/bookmark would work, no?

~~~
throwaway2016a
Not exactly. At least not until the browser has APIs to interact with more
parts of the operating systems.

The only times I've considered writing an Electron app vs a web app (which is
my day job) is when it would have benefitted from an offline-first and/or
needed system resources like tray icons, interacting with other desktop apps,
reading system-level stats, executing native code, etc.

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blowski
"Pomodoro" as a time-management technique is a registered trademark:

[https://cirillocompany.de/pages/the-pomodoro-technique-
trade...](https://cirillocompany.de/pages/the-pomodoro-technique-trademark-
guidelines)

~~~
amitmerchant
And for those reasons only I haven't used the same exact name and same exact
logo. :)

~~~
bbcbasic
Ianal but I'd be worried, you are quite close.

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sdegutis
One of my favorite skills & challenges is do things as efficiency as possible,
and using Electron for an app like this just strikes me as super-duper
wasteful, especially for an app that'll be running all the time. That said,
it's probably not going to make that huge of a dent in daily battery life.

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StClaire
I did Pomodoros all the time before I really started programming. Now I just
like to lock into a flow and work until I can't or I get frustrated debugging
and take a break

~~~
NTripleOne
Now that I think about it, as a smoker I've sort of naturally fell into some
'pomodoro-like' scheme with my own work, in that I generally work for 50-60~
minutes and then take a 5-10 minute fag break.

On a somewhat related note, I've noticed that I only really smoke (tobacco) at
work, and rarely at home. I'll have 6-8 throughout my 10 hour workday and
maybe 1 or 2 after I get home... I guess my job really is killing me haha.

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Kinnard
For those wondering what the pomodoro technique is:
[http://pomodorotechnique.org](http://pomodorotechnique.org)

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steelbird
Similar to [http://gnomepomodoro.org/](http://gnomepomodoro.org/)

Been using it on xfce alright.

~~~
WizardOfTheWest
I too can vouch the goodness of this program.

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meowlicious
About 7yrs ago I published a basic pomodoro app to app store . I received
intellectual property infringement notice from 'FC Garage GmbH' to take my app
down, which I did. The email on that notice was legal@pomodorotechnique.com,
so I assume it has something to with the guy who created it.

~~~
josho
A trademark claim does not restrict you from selling your product it merely
restricts you from using their name and logo (or confusingly similar
name/logo)

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oldsj
Aw man this looks cool but I was hoping for something more lightweight than
Tomightly and its JVM requirement.

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zython
I cannot get behind the idea that I need 173 mb in libraries and module for
what is essentially a simplistic timer, but it looks nice and works on linux
(at least on my machien and from the screenshot it looks like it works on
windows aswell), so I have mixed feelings about this app.

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amitmerchant
For all those who want to try/see the working of the app can check out this
Codepen that I've set up :
[https://codepen.io/amit_merchant/pen/NpvZJo](https://codepen.io/amit_merchant/pen/NpvZJo)

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jedikv
(Electron issues aside) - Pretty nice & clean UI - gonna give it a try.

~~~
amitmerchant
Hey! Thanks! Do let me know if you want any improvement/feature for the same.

------
h2hn
shameless plug:

[https://github.com/liloman/pomodoroTasks2](https://github.com/liloman/pomodoroTasks2)

