Evidence-first research

Built a unique radial menu app for mac to perform everyday tasks and more

# Problem A lot of everyday actions on a Mac live in completely different places. Opening an app or folder, searching something on a website, taking a screenshot, cleaning up copied text, accessing clipboard history, running a Shortcut, or changing a system setting. None of these are hard to get to, but constantly switching between apps, windows, menu bar utilities, and different shortcuts can break your flow. I wanted to see if all of that could work through one system, which is where the radial menu idea came from. # Comparison There are already some really good radial menu apps for Mac, but most are built around a specific use case, such as launching apps, or switching between them. Arc takes a broader approach. You can create multiple global radial menus for different workflows and decide what each slice does. A slice can perform a single action or chain multiple actions together. The idea is less about replacing the Dock and more about putting the small things you do throughout the day behind one quick interaction. Arc also doesn't require accessibility features, it manages everything on-device, privately. # Technical Getting a radial menu on screen was the easy part. Figuring out what actually belongs inside it, how multiple menus should behave, and keeping the interaction fast enough to use throughout the day took most of the iteration. It's built entirely in SwiftUI. One of the more interesting technical problems was getting the hit-testing right across every slice wh

Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service

Show HN: I created an open source locally usable full fledged AI platform

hi to all the readers this post is for my recent opensource project called ENZO now answering what is enzo so enzo is an opensource platform where i clubbed all the free available api for anyone use under one hood with more than 2000 models available to use for chatting coding researching and much more now answering the most common question of why you should put your time looking the project so it has few distinct feature meaning it has a dedicated agents tab where you can describe your need and create a special agent just for one specific task with master ability in that domain second it has the ability to connect your gmail drive and calendar and then you can ask it to perform some specific tasks like reading you the most important mail of the day or finding recruiter mails and creating personalized reply based on your data which it stores locally on your device third the coding mode offers a dedicated preview window where you can see your code running and have a look of it feels and edit it in realtime as well as all the modes are packed with dedicated skills which delivers promising results fourth the ui features some additional things such as music tab where you can listen to any music want and it has a custom personalized feature which runs in background and an llm understands your taste and recommends similar kind of music you like fifth the most important why your trust it with your api key then to explain i would say enzo a dedicated vault which manages all your api

MCP in macOS apps: are they useful for you?

I've been using [**BetterTouchTool**](https://folivora.ai/) for more than 10 years by now, it was the first mind-blowing app I installed, it made my MacBook trackpad the control plane for audio volume, media play/pause, tab navigation etc. Recently I found the dev implemented **MCP** *(Model Context Protocol)* inside it, and I was at first skeptical, like you know the instinctual feeling of *"why does everything need to contain AI nowadays?"*. But simply because now I knew about it, I found myself using it quite often. >MCP in this case is a way for apps to expose their capabilities in a way that LLM AI agents can understand and control without a GUI. Just a few things this BTT MCP enabled for me: **Remapping many keys at once** By default, without `fn`, `F3` opens Mission Control, `F4` opens Spotlight and `F5` is for dictation. I don't use any of those things, so I asked BTT to map them to various screenshot utilities inside Cleanshot. I also use diacritics in Romanian but rare enough that I prefer having the international keyboard layout by default. So I had it remap `fn`\-`A/S/T/I` to `ă/ș/ț/î`. **Song key finder hotkey** I used to run a script to find the musical key of the song I'm listening to, so I know what instrument I can use to improvise on top of it. It recently occured to me I can ask BTT to implement a nice UI, the whole audio pipeline and key finder logic under a simple `fn-k` hotkey. [Song key finder using BTT](https://preview.redd.it/3kqenr2owiqh1.jpg?width=7

The Most Underrated macOS + iPad Feature

Hey devs! 👋 I was exploring macOS 27 recently and found something that I feel is seriously underrated and doesn’t get talked about much being able to control macOS from the iPad screen while casting it. Honestly, this is one of my favourite features. It has so much potential but the experience still feels a bit rough. Some touch controls aren’t really optimized for iPad, and a few important things are missing like better Mission Control support, easier window management, and more touch friendly controls overall. I feel like there’s a lot we could build around this to make using macOS through an iPad feel way more seamless and usable. So devs, what do you think? What kind of app, tool or features could we build around this? Would love to hear some ideas by users too!

Ask HN: How do you interview devs in a post-AI world?

Since the rise of AI coding assistants, about 80% of the dev candidates that I interview tell me that they aren't writing much code themselves anymore - they are directing agents instead. This makes me deeply uncomfortable (although maybe I'm just being old-fashioned). I still want to know that devs on my team can actually write code themselves, and have some idea of what they are doing when it comes to system design. This is increasingly challenging given how rapidly the AI tools are evolving. I'm curious what other folks are seeing in a post-AI hiring landscape and how you are approaching candidates that tell you they are fully agent-pilled when it comes to their development process. Should I keep doing the conventional leetcode and design interviews? Or just give up and expect everyone is going to use Claude Code no matter what?

DayBar v4.2 is out: Menu bar calendar with lunar dates and TODO reminder features

DayBar is an application that displays the local date and reminder events in the menu bar. Click on DayBar in the menu bar to view the calendar, calendar events, and reminders, and it supports synchronization with Apple Calendar. It integrates calendar and reminder functions into the status bar menu for easy management and viewing, while turning reminders into simple and beautiful to-do items. **Comparison:** Compared with the system native date widget and Dato app, DayBar integrates weekday display, custom date formatting, pop-up calendar panel and Chinese lunar calendar display into one menu bar tool. It directly synchronizes system calendar events and presents them as intuitive to-do items, while native date tools only show basic time information without calendar pop-ups and todo management; Dato focuses more on time and system status display and lacks built-in lunar calendar and lightweight schedule todo conversion capabilities. **Problem:** Based on the system's native calendar, add a persistent weekday display and date formatting in the menu bar. Click to pop up a mini calendar panel that supports showing the lunar calendar and system calendar events, and displays these events as to-do items. **Pricing:** All Access Lifetime $3.99 **Changelog(v4.2):** Fix menu icon jitter and main thread warning, update app icon and optimize long‑term memory usage. **v4.1.0** 1. feat: add more date format options for the menu bar. 2. fix: Simplify status bar menu and fix Commands locali

Show HN: CUA-S1 – A System One Model for Computer Use

Hello HN! We're Dillon and Francesco from Cua. We were wondering how many computer use tasks actually need a full general purpose LLM (e.g. gpt-6-astra, claude-opus-5 etc.) to think through all their decisions and steps. Some tasks require thinking about a plan, exploring different paths, recovering from failure. Other tasks are a question of making local decisions, like this value should go in this box, or should I check this box, or this element should be ignored. We wondered how far we could go with a small model trained to only make these kinds of decisions. Our inspiration was Typesafe's Jev and its System One Model framing. This is a nod to the dichotomy between thinking quickly, automatically, and intuitively (system 1) vs. thinking slowly, analytically (system 2), as described by Daniel Kahneman. The interesting question for us was: what happens if you give a model an interface of current context, and a set of possible choices, and you ask it to return a probability for each choice? This kind of model does not generate output token by token like most LLMs do, but rather scores the options you give it, which you can check, trust, and use to drive your app's behavior. CUA-S1 is our answer for narrow, specialized decision models for computer use. Our first release is CUA-S1-FORMS. We built this from ideas and code in jevlike, and then trained a second model just to handle form interactions. It has 706k parameters, and the original checkpoint is 2.8 MB. The first training

The Most Underrated macOS + iPad Feature

Hey devs! 👋 I was exploring macOS 27 recently and found something that I feel is seriously underrated and doesn’t get talked about much being able to control macOS from the iPad screen while casting it. Honestly, this is one of my favourite features. It has so much potential but the experience still feels a bit rough. Some touch controls aren’t really optimized for iPad, and a few important things are missing like better Mission Control support, easier window management, and more touch friendly controls overall. I feel like there’s a lot we could build around this to make using macOS through an iPad feel way more seamless and usable. So devs, what do you think? What kind of app, tool or features could we build around this? Would love to hear some ideas by users too!

Ask HN: How do you interview devs in a post-AI world?

Since the rise of AI coding assistants, about 80% of the dev candidates that I interview tell me that they aren't writing much code themselves anymore - they are directing agents instead. This makes me deeply uncomfortable (although maybe I'm just being old-fashioned). I still want to know that devs on my team can actually write code themselves, and have some idea of what they are doing when it comes to system design. This is increasingly challenging given how rapidly the AI tools are evolving. I'm curious what other folks are seeing in a post-AI hiring landscape and how you are approaching candidates that tell you they are fully agent-pilled when it comes to their development process. Should I keep doing the conventional leetcode and design interviews? Or just give up and expect everyone is going to use Claude Code no matter what?

DayBar v4.2 is out: Menu bar calendar with lunar dates and TODO reminder features

DayBar is an application that displays the local date and reminder events in the menu bar. Click on DayBar in the menu bar to view the calendar, calendar events, and reminders, and it supports synchronization with Apple Calendar. It integrates calendar and reminder functions into the status bar menu for easy management and viewing, while turning reminders into simple and beautiful to-do items. **Comparison:** Compared with the system native date widget and Dato app, DayBar integrates weekday display, custom date formatting, pop-up calendar panel and Chinese lunar calendar display into one menu bar tool. It directly synchronizes system calendar events and presents them as intuitive to-do items, while native date tools only show basic time information without calendar pop-ups and todo management; Dato focuses more on time and system status display and lacks built-in lunar calendar and lightweight schedule todo conversion capabilities. **Problem:** Based on the system's native calendar, add a persistent weekday display and date formatting in the menu bar. Click to pop up a mini calendar panel that supports showing the lunar calendar and system calendar events, and displays these events as to-do items. **Pricing:** All Access Lifetime $3.99 **Changelog(v4.2):** Fix menu icon jitter and main thread warning, update app icon and optimize long‑term memory usage. **v4.1.0** 1. feat: add more date format options for the menu bar. 2. fix: Simplify status bar menu and fix Commands locali

Show HN: CUA-S1 – A System One Model for Computer Use

Hello HN! We're Dillon and Francesco from Cua. We were wondering how many computer use tasks actually need a full general purpose LLM (e.g. gpt-6-astra, claude-opus-5 etc.) to think through all their decisions and steps. Some tasks require thinking about a plan, exploring different paths, recovering from failure. Other tasks are a question of making local decisions, like this value should go in this box, or should I check this box, or this element should be ignored. We wondered how far we could go with a small model trained to only make these kinds of decisions. Our inspiration was Typesafe's Jev and its System One Model framing. This is a nod to the dichotomy between thinking quickly, automatically, and intuitively (system 1) vs. thinking slowly, analytically (system 2), as described by Daniel Kahneman. The interesting question for us was: what happens if you give a model an interface of current context, and a set of possible choices, and you ask it to return a probability for each choice? This kind of model does not generate output token by token like most LLMs do, but rather scores the options you give it, which you can check, trust, and use to drive your app's behavior. CUA-S1 is our answer for narrow, specialized decision models for computer use. Our first release is CUA-S1-FORMS. We built this from ideas and code in jevlike, and then trained a second model just to handle form interactions. It has 706k parameters, and the original checkpoint is 2.8 MB. The first training

flowy 2.0 release - 100 free lifetime licenses

It's been a bit over a year since [flowy](https://getflowy.app) launched on [Mac App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flowy-screen-recorder-editor/id6748351905) (and this subreddit) - since then, it touched over 3.2K devices and received 33 updates. Today marks the biggest one: after months in the making, 2.0 is finally here. \_\_ flowy is a professional screen recorder & video editor available on mac, providing a user-friendly interface to edit your recordings - featuring automatic effects and suggestions generated based on your interactions. **2.0 key features** **On-device AI** and **Audio Transcription**: Generate, summarize, edit, export, and embed audio transcripts as video captions using on-device AI models from your Mac, so your data stays private (macOS 26.0+). **Professional editing tools**: Add annotations (text, blurs, shapes, key shortcuts, captions) or uploaded images, adjust segment playback speeds (with auto-speedup for typing), and export as GIF. **Dynamic Layout** and **Animations**: Switch camera layouts any time during the recording and perform in-depth customizations to zoom transitions, motion blur, and cursor effects/movements. **Fixes & Improvements**: A lot of stability improvements - higher recording fps, snappier Editor, UI/UX designed to make your work easier. You can also report issues directly from the app. \_\_ **competitors** Everyone knows Screen Studio. All I can say is that flowy endorses fair pricing that puts the user first, with no su

Barista 1.1 big feature update: deeper Email, Calendar, Weather and News widgets, command palette, custom shortcuts, floating popovers, and (33% off)

Hi everyone! Two months ago I launched Barista here, and the response and feedback from this sub were more than I'd hoped for. Version 1.1 is out today, and a lot of it comes straight from your comments and suggestions, so I wanted to share it here first. **Quick recap, if you missed it** Barista is a menu-bar widget suite for macOS. It's one native app with 35+ widgets (calendar, reminders, a real email client, clipboard history, weather, stocks, news, system stats, utilities and a few tiny games), and you turn them on and off from a single window. It replaces the pile of single-purpose menu-bar apps, and it's private by design: no account, no telemetry, no Barista server, a sandboxed App Store build using public APIs only. **Depth over breadth** After launch, my goal was not to keep adding widgets but to make the existing ones deeper and much nicer to use. 1.1 follows through on that. There are no new widgets; instead the ones you use most do more, and the whole app is faster to get around. **New in 1.1** Getting around faster: * **Command palette:** a Spotlight-style search to open any widget by name. If the widget isn't in your bar, it adds it and opens it. This one was asked for in the launch thread. * **Custom global keyboard shortcuts:** rebind the bar, Search, Clipboard and the palette, add quick-add reminder and quick-add event, and give any widget its own hotkey. Clear any shortcut you don't want, or restore the defaults. * **Notifications that take you somewhere:**

Ask HN: Losing motivation to work in the IT field, need advice

Hello folks, I am a senior Software Engineer working in the IT field for close to 16 years. Before AI coding tools became prevalent, I enjoyed writing code, architecting software systems, and speaking to the stakeholders. These past 2 - 3 years, since companies have been using AI tools heavily, I noticed most of the work has been delegated to AI. It's just prompting it to do work while I monitor its inputs and outputs, then redefining the prompts. This work flow really took away my passion and joy of writing and building software systems. I don't know where I am heading next... most of my friends either move on to work on their solopreneur journey or switch careers completely. I can say my passion for building software is definitely diminished due to heavy AI usage Has anyone experienced this? How do you cope with it? Did you end up switching careers? thanks for your comments :)

Tell HN: You Can Use "Screen Mirroring" in EU on iOS 27 via Xcode and Device Hub

I accidentally found out that if you select your own phone from the Xcode’s list of devices where to run an app compilation, and then you select “Manage Devices...” for some reason, another Device Hub tab opens with your phone, and you can use it normally via macOS. It’s not exactly the "screen mirroring" feature, but it’s basically the same. Here's a short video of the workaround: https://streamable.com/4fku9m