HackerTray is an open source, free and simple desktop application, a panel applet (indicator) for the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, providing a real-time feed aggregator of the top stories from the Hacker News website (https://news.ycombinator.com), in the system tray area of your desktop environment.

Key features include a minimalist user interface for displaying the latest Hacker News articles, allows users to open links in their default web browser, keeps track of opened links, and displays comment and points count in a simple format.

The application is inspired by the Hacker Bar utility for the Mac OS X operating system, and comes with support for a fallback mode, in case AppIndicator is not available. HackerTray can only be used on Ubuntu distributions that use the Unity interface. It has been successfully teste with 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Ubntu.

Once again, we remind everyone that HackerTray has been specifically designed for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, as it integrates into the Unity Indicator component (system tray). Installing it is quite easy and three different installation methods are available on the project’s website (see link at the end of the article).

Once installed, you can fire up HackerTray by searching it in Unity Dash and clicking on its launcher. An Y sign will appear in the system tray area, next to your other indicators. Simply click the Y icon to see a list of the top news articles submitted to the Hacker News website.

While HackerTray has no graphical configuration dialog, it accepts various command-line options. Users will be able to enable support for comments, to specify the path to the Google Chrome profile folder, to specify the path to the Mozilla Firefox profile directory, as well as to disable analytics.