create sample MacGap app

[jeff-h]

We're in the process of pulling MacGap through a metamorphosis of sorts. The documentation has all been improved (with more coming), we're moving MacGap to a GitHub organisation, we have a shiny promo website underway, and most importantly MacGap 2 is starting to look awesome.

As part of this effort, I think a sample MacGap app would be really great. In fact over time two or more sample apps would be even better. It can be tricky to get started in MG and this would help ease new JavaScript developers into the project.

I also think it would be awesome if we could get the sample app accepted into the Mac App Store. It would be good visibility for the project, and it would be good proof that you can get a MG app accepted onto the MAS.

I'm not really sure what the sample app should do. I have a few thoughts:

• it could be something that is actually useful e.g. a MacGap documentation viewer (I personally would love using this :)
• it could be a (useless) app that attempts to demo in a real app situation each one of the macgap commands (e.g. it would have UI controls to trigger dock badge changes, menu item additions etc).
• your ideas here

We'd have to think about whether it would be ok to use Angular, Backbone or whatever, or whether we should try to do without, in order to avoid making the demo hard to understand for anyone not using that framework. I think just using jQuery would be best, but I personally wouldn't relish the thought of building an app without using my favourite JS framework :)

[gobijan]

A demo app sounds like a good way to get started. I would mainly showcase api stuff and leave the selection of frameworks up to the js developer. For the demo I would prefer to use vanilla javascript and have zero dependencies to other libraries. I could imagine something like click here to open a file dialog or fill the number of active badges into this textfield and click set badge button or to offer a repl and maybe an interactive tutorial.

[jeff-h]

Not sure we need to ditch jQuery — I think the reality these days is probably that more people use it than those who don't. I'm on board with everything else you've suggested.

One counter-argument for this kind of demo app would be that I am keen to have a "usage example" code snippet for each API command in the API documentation. I see this as being a copy-and-pastable snippet of actual working JS code which makes the command do something. Do you think this would replace the need for an app that does the same thing (but would have a lot of extra code to add a UI to trigger each command)?

[gobijan]

Yeah, jQuery might be okay :D I'd say we polish macgap2, the website and the docs. As soon as all of the above is ready we could go for the demo app or even a boilerplate to get started.

[jeff-h]

You're right. There's lots to be done and the actual code, the site and the docs are the biggest priorities.

Let's revisit this after those are looking good.