Rethinking Awesome Lists
An awesome list is a list of awesome things curated by the community. There are awesome lists about everything from CLI applications to fantasy books. The main repository serves as a curated list of awesome lists. Yes, an awesome list of awesome lists :)
I have been using awesome lists throughout my career as a quick and rich source for curated apps and frameworks for many years now. Lately, I started to think, how can I take the idea and move it to the next level?
While awesome lists serve their purpose well, they fall short in some areas:
Poor Visual Design
Usually, awesome lists are formatted as a markdown document; they lack visual design, which makes it hard to browse and scan quickly for a specific item due to the lack of icons.
No Install instruction
All that most awesome lists provide is a name, link, and short description. Further information about installing the item is in the item's website or README page.
Not able to install many items at once
There is no "Add to my list" option, where you can select many items and install them at once.
Meet MaxItUp
MaxItUp is not only an awesome list for MacOS apps and packages. It is a tool to create a setup script for newly formatted Mac devices as well that contains apps, packages, system preferences and more…
Just start selecting items from the list and watch how the setup script is updating! After downloading the setup script, move to your download directory and use your Terminal to run the script and install selected apps and packages by running
bash
sh setup.sh
Your all set, your Terminal will inform you about the progress of the install and when the setup process is done.
The project is 100% open source and consists of two main repositories
/contents repo
The JSON file contains two arrays, one for categories and another for items, changing this file will change the content in the website. Adding your contribution is just a pull request away!
/mac repo
Contains the source code for mac website, built using React, Redux, CSS flexboxes, and other cool technologies.
Visit the website
MaxItUp is still in its early stages, and your feedback and support is very important. If you have a suggestion please open an issue, or if you like the project please give it a star on Github and share it on Twitter to let others know about it.
Thanks
- Bashar Ghadanfar for coming up with the name MaxItUp! and designing the project's visual identity.
- Max Howell for creating Homebrew, without him, MaxItUp would not exist.
