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bbodi / notecalc3

NoteCalc is a handy calculator trying to bring the advantages of Soulver to the web.
https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
1.16k stars 43 forks source link

Native desktop client #6

Open dizda opened 3 years ago

dizda commented 3 years ago

Awesome tool! I could see myself using this, to replace my boring SublimeText as a notepad.

Have you thought about integrating into an webview app like electron (but lighter ofc), if so, that would become even more handy.

Good idea and good job.

bbodi commented 3 years ago

Hi, thanks :)

Could you please elaborate what you mean by being "more handy" by using electron?

dizda commented 3 years ago

Sorry, I mean, having this Notepad as a native tool rather than using it within' the web browser :)

bbodi commented 3 years ago

I see, thanks :)

One of the primary goal of NoteCalc is to be easily accessible (e.g. it was mainly born because Soulver is MacOS only). Currently NoteCalc is available from Windows, Linux, MacOs, Android etc while maintaining a single codebase, and I see no benefits to make a native frontend for it.

For example on my android phone I created an icon for the NoteCalc website, so it looks and behaves like a native app.

However I admit that NoteCalc should work offline without internet connection, it is on my list.

Additionally, the app was written in a way to make it easy to write different frontend for it (99% of the application is the "backend", which does the parsing, calculations and generate what to render, and only a tiny part [the "frontend"] is responsible for rendering and input handling, and only this tiny part needs to be ported). Moreover the whole render system was designed in a character-based style, to be easy to write a console-based frontend.

So I am sure that I will write some frontend for it in the future, but not out of necessity, but out of fun, e.g. trying out some new programming language. And that frontend will be probably some lightweight app using the console or SDL/OpenGL.

dizda commented 3 years ago

I was not aware of Soulver, I'll have a look at it.

Actually, I haven't thought about testing it through a Progressive App on Google Chrome OSX, that's a good call, and should be a way to have it pretty close to a "desktop" native app without efforts :)

Currently NoteCalc is available from Windows, Linux, MacOs, Android etc while maintaining a single codebase, and I see no benefits to make a native frontend for it.

I was more thinking about something like https://github.com/Boscop/web-view which should supports the current code base if I'm not wrong.

Anyways, I'll have a look at the different options and may come back to you if my time allows it, thanks for your time and this amazing project.

abhijit-hota commented 3 years ago

Making it an PWA will be better.

9

dmose commented 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, what was the motivation for using Canvas rather than DOM?

bbodi commented 3 years ago

Hi,

Thanks for the question.

I think there is a premise that the chosen canvas-based solution is the more difficult choice, but I think it just stems from the fact that it seems easy to render/type thing in HTML.

As soon as the app needs more interaction with the editor (knowing where is the cursor, what is selected, using "line references" [alt+up arrow in NoteCalc to choose an other line], what has been updated etc), then updating and rendering only the changed lines with syntax- and other highlighting features, not to talk about upcoming features such as autocompletion dialog box, my opinion is that the canvas-based solution is simpler and can perform better, and it is trivial to port to OpenGL or to the terminal.