The development phase of any new project is a lot of fun, but there comes a time when you have to ship the product. Once the decision to switch to NW.js was made, the transition was quite smooth - it was only a matter of moving over from Chrome APIs to node.js modules and some minor UI changes. The bits we do share in common are prominent in our other projects too, including CoffeeScript which has become a major player in our projects with Knockout.js dominating the interface, LESS for much easier and consistent styling, and Jade for faster templating (although I believe so far the latter is only used in the timer and chat apps). Although the Timer codebase hasn’t strayed too far from the original, Teamwork Chat has grown to a big, well-structured codebase - you would not be able to tell it all started from . We started off working on a basic app “shell” which could be shared between our projects, however, after initial set-up, our projects went in quite different directions and the base-app repo hasn’t seen any love in quite a long time. Its having node.js bundled-in was the main selling point, as it opens up a lot more options than client-only JavaScript. It wasn’t the only HTML/CSS/JS-to-desktop framework at the time, but it was looking like the most promising. Being the new kid on the block, NW.js was getting quite a lot of attention. As they were faced with a similar challenge (among many others) of building a cross-platform desktop application, they came up with the idea of using NW.js (node-webkit at the time). Enter NW.jsĪround the same time, the Teamwork Chat team, or rather - duo at the time (Adam and Donal) was born. However, I was not altogether happy with the idea of restricting our customers to a single browser - although I do love Google Chrome and it’s my browser of choice, it would be unfair to restrict it to Chrome users. At the end of the month I had started working on a Chrome app - this was to be our solution for a cross-platform program. I had a few options for my next project, but one that caught my attention was a rework of our old Adobe Air-based timer. In the middle of January 2014, I had just finished up and released the first version of the Chrome Extension. I’m going to roughly outline it in this post. Getting the app to the point it is at now was a long and gruesome, but still very enjoyable process. I am currently the lead developer of our new revamped cross-platform Timer App. It has been quite some time since my last Engine Room post and it’s about time I contributed once again! Note: This was originally posted on the developer blog - Engine Room.
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