My first desktop application

tl;dr

• I decided to participate in the Product Hunt Makers Festival
• ended up building my first desktop app
• had to learn the basics of Electron, Node.js, Express, React, GraphQL, Apollo to accomplish my goal
• spent a ton of time by watching and reading tutorials just to make the basic authentication process work
• had dreams about the issues I struggled with
• finished in time and didn't lose all my hair during the process
• to manage your Maker Goals on Product Hunt right from your desktop, head over to makergoals.netlify.app

Ok, real desktop app developers would probably say that I'm a cheater because Electron is not the way real desktop apps are made. Still, if someone would ask me if I ever built something for the desktop, I would say, yes.

For those, who are not familiar with Electron, here is a short explanation: with the help of Electron, you can build cross-platform desktop applications by using web technologies. Under the hood, it's Chromium and Node.js

It makes it really easy to use one code base and publish your application to macOS, Windows, and Linux at the same time. If you could build a website, with the help of Electron you would probably be able to build a desktop application as well. To get started, you can read more about it on the official website: https://electronjs.org/

About 3 weeks ago I decided to participate in the Product Hunt Makers Festival - The 'API Edition'. At first, I thought that I'll build a web app because that is what I have the most experience with. I'm not good at building fun and crazy tools so I wanted to create something useful. "Sadly", the only thing that came into my mind was a desktop app that helps makers manage their goals. Nothing else popped into my mind before the end of the registration phase, so I went with that.

I knew that the hardest part would be authentication. I was familiar with the OAuth process, but on the web not on desktop. I spent almost a week to realize that I couldn't accomplish it the way I wanted. Luckily, there was a starter kit that I could use as a base point, but it was built with React.

A few months ago I already started an online course to get familiar with React but I didn't finish it and never used it with the real application before. I'm not saying that I felt this is the time to do it 😂 But I didn't really have a choice. I still had 2 weeks before the end of the submission period so I started to re-watch the episodes. Thanks to the great explanations in them, after a few hours I felt that now I understand why the starter kit looks as it is and what are the first steps I should make. About 5 days later I was ready with the inside and outside ugly, buggy MVP. During these days I had a few nights when I dreamed about props and states and routes, but at least I could sleep 😄

I knew that I had to refactor the whole codebase to not go crazy if I want to change something, so I spent a few hours on that too. At that point, I was ready with a web app, which wasn't even close to the one I had in my head when I started to build the app. I thought that wrapping it "around" Electron will be easy after my fights with React, but of course, I was wrong.

I had a nice list of stories about the functions I wanted to add to the app and to accomplish that, I had to solve the communication between the React app and Electron. I was naive when I thought it's just "import { shell } from 'electron'", that would be easy 😄 Long story short, I spent 2 more days to find out how to open the default browser if someone clicks on a link inside the Electron app.

As creating the basic functions didn't happen as I planned I ran out of time to add the extra features that were on my todo list. Anyway, I'm still happy with the result and I hope others will like it and will use it too.

So if you are looking for a tool to manage your Maker Goals on Product Hunt right from your desktop, head over to makergoals.netlify.app and download Maker Goals Menubar (for macOS) today.

Windows version will be available as soon as I figure out why the current package crashes on install. So probably a week or so 😄 Stay tuned!