Book Image

Electron Projects

By : Denys Vuika
Book Image

Electron Projects

By: Denys Vuika

Overview of this book

The Electron framework allows you to use modern web technologies to build applications that share the same code across all operating systems and platforms. This also helps designers to easily transition from the web to the desktop. Electron Projects guides you through building cross-platform Electron apps with modern web technologies and JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React.js, and Vue.js. You’ll explore the process of configuring modern JavaScript frameworks and UI libraries, real-time analytics and automatic updates, and interactions with the operating system. You’ll get hands-on with building a basic Electron app, before moving on to implement a Markdown Editor. In addition to this, you’ll be able to experiment with major JavaScript frameworks such as Angular and Vue.js, discovering ways to integrate them with Electron apps for building cross-platform desktop apps. Later, you’ll learn to build a screenshot snipping tool, a mini-game, and a music player, while also gaining insights into analytics, bug tracking, and licensing. You’ll then get to grips with building a chat app, an eBook generator and finally a simple digital wallet app. By the end of this book, you’ll have experience in building a variety of projects and project templates that will help you to apply your knowledge when creating your own cross-platform applications.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Integrating the application menu

As you already know, your application is essentially an HTML5 stack running inside Chromium, and Electron provides all necessary integration with the underlying operating system, whether that's macOS, Windows, or Linux.

The concept of application menus is slightly different across platforms. macOS, for instance, provides a single application menu that reflects the active application and displays the corresponding menu items. The Windows system tends to provide a separate menu for each instance of the application window. Finally, Linux systems usually vary based on the window manager's implementations.

Handling every case would be quite cumbersome for developers; that is why the Electron framework provides a unified interface for building application menus from the JSON definition and takes care of integration details.

Let's take...