anconam

With all due respect, a compile pipeline across Win, Mac, Linux, for different CPU architectures, making sure signing works for all, and that the Electron auto-updater works as expected is a nightmare. I have been there, and it’s not fun.

The main takeaway is the difference between priority and importance. But why todo apps always use priority then?

In my opinion having a yearly big release is not great for users. Feature and fixes should that could roll out weekly are artificially delayed to the next major release only because of the pricing model.

True that Cleanshot works well and was there before but I feel like it should be mentioned that the background feature was copied 1:1 from Xnapper from Tony.

An article about finding your personal flow at work - for productivy nerds

Yes, it is a Desktop app. Would you like to see a download button for a Linux installer while browsing from iOS? What would you suggest to show alternatively?

About the permission to delete contacts and calendars, as mentioned earlier, the problem is that Google does not offer a way to exclude the “delete operation” from the grant. MineTime contains no code that could ever delete contacts or calendars.

Unfortunately Google gives no granularity to ask for read-only access. We definitely don’t delete calendars or contacts: in fact, there is no code in MineTime that can do that, neither on purpose nor accidentally.

Although it might looks like a weird design choice, an installed app was the only possible choice not to store the user credentials on our servers. I have elaborated this in another post.

Hello everyone! Marco here, main contributor of MineTime. Even though I didn’t start this thread, I am very happy to see enthusiasm about the project and I am very interested in hearing your feedback.

Here are some background information and (opinionated) replies to some of the concerns:

- I know that for many 21st century means “mobile-first”. There are several great calendar apps for iOS and Android and I believe the focus on these larger markets only has prevented the progress of productivity tools for desktop environments (see, for example, lack of a fully-featured calendar application on Linux). At some point we surely want to have a mobile version but at the moment we need to focus on something, and I believe desktop calendaring has some important gaps to be filled.

- Electron vs Native. This discussion is as old as Electron itself. Everyone would prefer a native app for his/her platform but the truth is that we (and many others) don’t have the resources to do that. Electron allows us to focus on developing new features, instead of spending time porting the old ones onto different platforms. Performance are surely not optimal but MineTime can be still largely optimized in this sense. And I am sorry for your RAM, it’s either this or nothing until somebody finds a way to optimize Electron. Calendar.google.com is not always an alternative.

- Web vs Installed App. We believe web apps cannot provide the same UX of a native app. Yes, I used the term “native”, although controversial, because MineTime still uses many native OS APIs to integrate into your system, something that a web app can simply not do! But the main reason why we decided for Electron when we started this project is different: user privacy and security. Any web-based calendar application would require us to sync your calendars on our servers. Now, we want to integrate all calendars, not just the easiest ones. Microsoft Exchange is still used in many corporations and they don’t provide an OAuth mechanism . This means we would have to store the user email and password on our servers, something that is simply awful. This is also the reason why no web-based calendar synchronizes with Exchange and will never do. With MineTime, your usernames, passwords or access tokens never leave your computer. Yes, if you agree, we transfer some calendar data and provide some interesting features in return. In the future, we expect to be able to provide all these “advanced” features without any data transfer at all, thanks to the fact that everything runs on your computer.

- Advanced features and AI. This is still WIP. Besides focusing on adding and improving all the necessary and well-deserved traditional calendar functionalities, we are doing research on Visual Analytics and Assisted Scheduling. Great improvements in this direction are expected to come during the summer, so stay tuned... An important side note: the calendar data is only used to provide these features, not for monetization, definitely not for espionage.

You can download MineTime for free on Windows,macOS and Linux from minetime.ai. Feel free to use the contact form for any question, feedback, or to tell us about your use case.