Any Lacona users here? Similar to LaunchBar and Alfred

Software
#1

I ran across an app in Setapp that I hadn’t noticed before. Lacona is in the same category as LaunchBar, Alfred, etc. Has a nice interface. Extensible via IFTTT integration, Applescripts, etc.

I’ve shut off LaunchBar for a while to see how Lacona plays out. Haven’t had success yet with the IFTTT integration.

I don’t see Lacona mentioned in the forum before, and wondered if anyone has run across it and what you think?

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#2

Well, I am currently running as a test Alfred for a month (instead of LB, where I am really worried about its feature), so I guess it is that time of year :slight_smile:
As for Lacona, I’ve tested it a year ago or so. I’ve found that it does nothing better compared to LB/Alfred, besides of IFTTT - which I find completely useless and mostly a security problem anyway. Bear in mind, that this is an app written in JS. In my test it was using enormous amounts of CPU and memory and would experience regular slowdowns. Also development seems to be stalled which is not a good sign for such a young project.
I would not waste my time with this one. The Launcher market for OSX, as small as it is, is largely consolidated around LB and Alfred. With no clear roadmap and support from Objective Development I assume they will drop the ball at some point so there will be only Alfred.

#3

Why are you worried about its future? Have they said they won’t develop LB any further?

Actually, it came to my attention today because there was an update. So maybe there’s life?

#4

Nothing special, just a general feeling, after using it for 4 years. It may be that it was always the modus operandi of the development team, but I would say with a lot of things do not leave a good feeling:

  • Forum is almost dead and visited mostly by spammers. No reddit channel. Bear in mind, it is a complex product with a lot of questions from customers, but there seems to be no interest from development side to communicate with users.
  • Support is very minimal: they mostly fix bugs which occur after major version breaks in macOS. I’ve send a feature request via mail in 2014, it was agreed that it needs to be fixed and was fixed - 2 years later. ¯\(ツ)/¯ Currently there is thread in forum about reproducible bug in the Clipboard, where some entries are not copied. Reported since 2 months, not fixed. This is a high-priority bug, from my understanding.
  • There is absolutely no roadmap. I am not even sure whether there will be a LB7 at some point. My questions to the LB regarding its future were ignored.
  • They make no efforts to consolidate the community - there is no central repository for actions, for example. How do you find them as a new user? Traversing all the git repos, which are mostly cloned versions of each other? It strongly diminishes the value of custom actions. I’ve written some simple actions for myself, but in general I prefer not to bother, because documentation is very basic and there is no help to get on how to write complex actions.
  • Documentation in general: it seems, at some point they’ve given up and decided to let the user documentation as it is. It was never updated for LB6.

My suspicion from all that is that they’ve drastically cut the development team of LB and there are maybe one or two guys doing maintenance. Thus, my suspicion is that we will never see LB7 and at some point in future it will be dropped, because no community -> no new users -> no sales -> no money for development. It would be sad, since it is a very good launcher.

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#5

Thank you, @ptarh – that’s very helpful. I appreciate the time you took to answer.

I’ve flipped back and forth between LB and Alfred every 6 months, since Quicksilver became inoperable, now many years ago. LB always seems to be too much trouble to understand, so the missing documentation for v6 (as you mentioned it) is an annoyance. I’ll play with Lacona then it will be time to flip over to Alfred again.

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#6

Oh, and if want another proof: go to their products page and compare the frequency of releases and number of improvements for different products:

  • Little Snitch: 12 releases in 2018 with a lot of new features introduced
  • LB 5 releases, 3 of them containing only a small number of bugfixes
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