TextBar

2023.12.20

Intro

After over 10 years since I wrote the first line of code for TextBar, I've decided to open-source the code. I haven't made any (sensible) plans about what will happen if anyone finds/uses this repo, but maybe best to wait and see anyway. If anybody does comes across this and wants to become an official contributor, let me know (rs@richsomerfield.com) with some reasons why you would be a good contributor.

Origin Story

I was working on a client-server product where I had to (many times a day) specify the public IP of my local machine into the client config. TextBar started as a way of showing that in my menubar so I could click it to add it to my clipboard, and evolved from there.

In early/mid 2015, I contacted @TJLuoma (as I'm an avid mac-nerd podcast listener, I'd was very aware of) which resulted in an article on MacStories (https://www.macstories.net/mac/textbar-puts-your-text-into-the-menu-bar/). I'm incredibly grateful for Tj writing that piece and it helped to raise the profile of TextBar such that after a year or so I was able to purchase an Apple Watch from the proceeds. It only every produced pocket-money levels of revenue, but getting paid for something you've done in your personal time is such a wonderful feeling that I'd like to thank everyone who bought a licence. Thank you.

Final Story... ?

TextBar was a great project for me to discover and learn Mac development on my personal time - I'd written a few (basic) iOS apps, but wanted to do something on Mac. For a long time, this was how I could justify the huge amount of hours I spent working on it and investigating issues. I never do Mac development now, and don't have the same amount of effort/time to dedicate to keeping it fresh.

So, as a final (?) chapter of TextBar's story, I'm posting the soure-code. I've made a few changes (removing a few libraries that were causing issues in the latest build) from the previous paid version, but hopefully they don't really cause any issues.

Epilogue

Thanks.

Instructions

• Clone repo
• Run pods install (requires cocoapods)
• Open TextBar.xcworkspace in Xcode
• Build + Run