Barber
Barber is a macOS application to keep track of application updates easily. It lives in your menu bar, and uses homebrew to determine what’s outdated and to update. See the #future section for planned improvements.
Contributing
Barber is a work-in-progress (including the name), so contributions are welcome. I use Github projects to keep track of issues and their statuses. I also use Gitmoji for commits, but it’s not required to contribute.
Future
My original plan for barber was a simple menu bar app to keep track of updates. However, I realized how nice a GUI for Homebrew would be – something that could actually resemble the ease-of-use of the Mac app store for the average user, but still be customizable for the power-user. To that end, I’d like to see barber become a more general GUI package manager frontend, using (for now) brew as a backend, maybe extending to more package managers (mas, npm, gem) in the future. I’d also like to see easy plugin support for new backends and new features.
Inspirations
I was inspired by a multitude of sources – first and foremost, the original idea for this came from the brilliant xBar (formerly bitbar) plugin, brew-updates. I was also inspired by the Manjaro package manager, pamac, which has both a CLI and a GUI, and supports a few different backends including the pacman repositories, the AUR, and the Snap/Flatpak stores.
