Show HN: Freeter is out of Beta | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Freeter is out of Beta

freeter.io

46 pointsAlexKaul24 comments

I really don't understand what this is at all. The home page doesn't really say and the examples listed in the guide are so different from each other that I can't find the common thread.

The examples seem cool, but I would really like 1-2 "killer app" features that your app can do, rather than a list of minor time saving shortcuts.

(I usually hate reading comments like this because I feel the commenter is just being pedantic and didn't take 5 seconds to read the page. In this case, I really have no clue.)

If you've ever used Grafana, Geckoboard, etc it feels similar to that but with additional desktop (clickable/interactive) functionality.

You set up your widgets for a project - buttons for "git commit", "gulp watch", "Open project in Sublime". Add in some browser windows for the project management - Trello, Harvest, Slack channel. It then serves as a main hub for the project you're working on. To me that sounded a little cumbersome but after seeing the cmd-shift-f global keyboard shortcut (Open/Switch to Freeter) I think I might try to use this on a couple of projects I have going.

Seems you can also set keyboard shortcuts for projects within the app too e.g. ctrl+f1 could be a dashboard for Website A development, ctrl+f2 could be Website B dev, etc.

Edit: Highly recommend taking a moment to read/skim through the guide. The feature that sold me on it was being able to use Dropbox or similar to sync projects between machines

Grafana & Geckoboard are for displaying charts as a dashboard. Freeter looks more like a mini window manager in an app... Even though you could just open up your project-related applications in a workspace and lay them out on a grid with i3.

I was saying the way you lay out the charts as a dashboard in Grafana is similar to how you lay out the windows/buttons in Freeter. Not that the apps are similar, just the interface.

Taking it for a test drive after thinking "nope." I predictable wanted a terminal.. my solution was grabbing a copy of wetty (https://github.com/krishnasrinivas/wetty), and adding a commander button to run wetty and browser set to the wetty url, and now I've got a terminal.

pop one off the yak stack..

I wish we'd stop using:

The $X for ... (a list of things but enumerated by an animation to type them out and delete them a character at a time)

The animation is so obtrusive that it makes it really hard to use the page and I see this on so many sites that it doesn't even feel novel anymore.

EDIT: Ctrl-Shift-F is a terrible choice for hotkey, used for "find but a bit different" in lots of apps.

You can change the hotkey[1]. A little odd it's a selection of choices rather than having the ability to record a combo but there's enough choice for my liking.

[1] https://i.imgsir.com/qRQZ.png

Edit: Just realised I'm commenting all over this comment section. Not affiliated with the product at all, just refreshing HN each time I come back from reading more of the guide

Exactly the app I was looking for, purchased within 15min of playing with it. When context switching between multiple projects, it's amazing to be able to create a "space" for each one.

Hi Alex, I like the idea but you need a couple of minutes to figure it out maybe it would be awesome to start off with an demo dashboard that people can use and get used to the app and maybe a guide on how to change things (sort of like an on boarding in web apps). I am going to send you an email. Cheers and keep up the good work.

Didn't think I would see Linux only desktop software! Can you comment on how big this market is? Obviously many people use Linux on desktop but I am curious what is your experience non getting these people to pay for desktop software.

>Didn't think I would see Linux only desktop software!

I think you've misinterpreted what you saw: the contents of the web page varies depending on which OS you use to access it.

When I visit the web page on a Mac, I see a big green "Download for Mac" button.

I don't get it. Your landing page doesn't make it clear what it does or what value it would provide. I'm confused, and that might affect your conversations.

Took me a while to figure out what this was — seems to be a way to organize a lot of disparate pieces and shortcuts into a project dashboard?

Sounds pretty good actually. However, it took me for a while to realize what it really did.

What is it that it does?

Congratulations! Are there plans on integrating some time tracking solution? It could be integrated with the invoice generation, but even a simple timer with play/pause button per project would be useful.

This was going to be my original comment but having given it some more thought this might be a bit of a big ask when you consider you would want to be able to export all of that data, generate reports from it and so on.

You could use something like Harvest, Toggl, etc inside a web widget

Toggl has an API, so a neat trick would to hook the built in timers to an API, beit Toggl or taskwarrior or whatever.

This is a very cool idea.

Did this formerly have a different name? I remember trying something like this out a while back.

The Home page says it's an organiser. It looks like it's a task switcher-type-thingy.

Does it only embed webapps? Can I put a desktop app, say MS Word, inside it?

which technologies stack did you use to build this?

I found it on the privacy[1] page

> Freeter is built on top of Electron[2] which uses Chromium[3] for embedding web browsers into the app.

[1] https://freeter.io/privacy

[2] https://electron.atom.io/

[3] https://www.chromium.org/Home

Reply on news.ycombinator.com