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 with the system tray

In most cases, the users of your application may only use it when required and then minimize or close the app.

You can significantly improve user experience by keeping the application up and running in the background and displaying it in the system tray area. Another essential feature is to have a global keyboard shortcut so that the users of your application can quickly invoke it without needing to use the mouse.

Let's start by integrating the system tray:

  1. First, you need to import the Menu and Tray objects from the Electron framework, the Tray integration, and also the path from Node.js to resolve the path to the Tray icon image:
      const { Menu, Tray } = require('electron');
const path = require('path');

let tray;
  1. Next, create a folder called assets and put a small 16 x 16 image in png format inside...