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All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air.
HiyokoBar is a menubar app. Click the icon — panel appears. Do the thing. Click away — panel disappears.
It sounds trivial. It took longer than expected to get right. Here's what I learned.
The constraint that shaped everything
A menubar panel has maybe 400px of vertical space. That's it.
This constraint forced decisions I wouldn't have made otherwise:
- Every feature had to earn its place. No "maybe someone will want this" features.
- Each action had to complete in one click or one step. Two-step actions don't belong in a menubar panel.
- Visual hierarchy matters more than in a full window — users scan, not read.
Constraints produce clarity. The limited space was the best design tool I had.
The technical decisions
Activation policy: accessory — no Dock icon, no Cmd+Tab entry.
Panel positioning: calculate from tray icon position on every click — the user might have moved it.
Focus behavior: hide on blur, but suppress blur-hiding during native dialogs. Took 3 iterations to get right.
Launch at login: LaunchAgent plist, not SMAppService — better compatibility with older macOS versions.
What users actually use
I added analytics (opt-in, local only) to see which features got tapped.
The top 3 features account for 80% of all interactions. The bottom 5 features combined account for under 5%.
I removed two features entirely after seeing the data. The app got better immediately — less to scan, less to understand, faster to use.
The lesson: ship with more features than you think users need. Then watch what they actually use. Then remove everything else.
The Product Hunt launch
HiyokoBar launched on Product Hunt on April 20, 2026.
Traffic spike: yes. Sustained sales from it: modest. The real value was the comments and feedback — several feature ideas came directly from PH discussions that I'd never have thought of.
My view on PH: worth doing once per app for the feedback loop, not for the traffic.
The one thing that surprised me
The users who emailed me feedback. Not bug reports — genuine "here's what this does for my workflow" messages.
Menubar apps attract a specific kind of user: people who care about their tools, who customize their environment, who notice when something is done right. These are the best users to have.
Build for them.
Hiyoko PDF Vault → https://hiyokoko.gumroad.com/l/HiyokoPDFVault
HiyokoBar → https://hiyokoko.gumroad.com/l/hiyokobar
X → @hiyoyok