If you've been active on Hive for a while, you probably know the routine.
You open your notifications, read a reply, think of an answer, type it out... then you remember you still wanted to add !ALIVE, !MMB, maybe !PIZZA, perhaps a few others. Then it's on to the next notification, and the next one after that. Somewhere around reply number thirty you start wondering whether you already answered that person five minutes ago or whether you only thought about answering them.
It's funny how the actual conversation often ends up taking less effort than everything around it.
The thing is... I normally reply a lot.
Between the different bots, communities and projects I maintain, I easily write hundreds of replies every week. After doing that long enough you start noticing the little annoyances, and once you're a developer that's usually dangerous, because your brain immediately goes:
"I could probably automate that..."
So I did.
Meet Reply&Tip
It isn't trying to become another Hive frontend. There are already excellent frontends.
Instead, it focuses on one very specific workflow:
Read → Reply → Tip → Next.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
The whole interface is built around staying in that flow. Log in with Hive Keychain, keep your hands on the keyboard, work through your notifications, and before you know it you've replied to twenty people instead of spending half your time clicking around.
Over the past months it quietly grew into something much bigger than I originally planned.
It now supports:
your notifications (replies and mentions)
any community feed by tag
your following feed
You can add your favorite tipping commands with a single click, build default tip combinations, use snippets on the number keys, keep reusable footers, filter and sort your queue, dismiss items you've already handled, preview mentions, mute accounts, and generally process conversations much faster than I ever managed with the traditional workflow.
It even works surprisingly well on mobile inside the Hive Keychain browser, which wasn't even one of the original goals.
One thing I was adamant about from the beginning is security.
Your posting key never touches my server.
Every transaction is signed locally through Hive Keychain, exactly the way it should be. There are no accounts to create, no passwords to remember, and your personal settings simply stay inside your own browser.
I also wanted to be transparent about analytics.
Yes, the application records a handful of anonymous usage events on my own server, simply because I'd like to know which buttons people actually use and where the workflow could be improved. No cookies, no advertising networks, no Google Analytics, no selling data, no mysterious third parties following you around the internet because you clicked a reply button on Hive.
In fact, if your browser blocks the analytics completely... the application simply keeps working.
As it should.
The nice thing about building your own tools is that you're not trying to maximize engagement or ad revenue. You're just trying to save yourself a few hundred unnecessary clicks every week.
If other people benefit from that as well, even better.
So if replying on Hive is part of your daily routine, give it a try.
And if you find yourself thinking "You know what would make this even better...", leave a comment. Most of the features that are already there started exactly that way.
(Adding a tip while you're there is still considered excellent life advice.)
And if you appreciate the tools I keep building for Hive, a witness vote for 
https://hivesigner.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=botlord&approve=true
See you around the blockchain.
