Articles tagged #electron
Cracking Electron apps open
I use the draw.io desktop app to
make diagrams for my website. I run it on an actual desktop, like Windows or
macOS, but the asset pipeline that converts .drawio
files, to .pdf
, to
.svg
, and then to .svg
again (but smaller) runs on Linux.
So I have a Rust program somewhere that opens headless chromium, and loads just the HTML/JS/CSS part of draw.io I need to render my diagrams, and then use Chromium's "print to PDF" functionality to save a PDF.
Truly headless draw.io exports
I love diagrams. I love them so much!
In fact, I have fairly poor visualization skills, so making a diagram is extremely helpful to me: I'll have some vague idea of how different things are connected, and then I'll make a diagram, and suddenly there's a tangible thing I can look at and talk about.
Of course the diagram only represents a fraction of what I had in mind in the first place, but that's okay: the point is to be able to talk about of a concept, and so I have to make choices about what to include in the diagram. And maybe make several diagrams.
The many rewrites of the itch.io desktop app
I started working on the itch.io desktop app over 4 years ago.
It has arguably been my main project ever since, along with companion projects like butler, capsule and many smaller libraries.
I'm fuzzy on the initial history, but I remember the codebase went through a lot of changes. As early as 2014, the whole codebase was ported from vanilla JavaScript to TypeScript. In 2016, I released . In 2018, I released a postmortem for v25 (which I then deleted).
Go back to the homepage.