Automation at your fingertips
This page is part of my #buildinpublic challenge. You can follow the progress on my twitter account. This build in public challenge is part of #venturism30, a hashtag that is used within the course Launch.OS which is created by mij brother Jelmer and his mate Marcus. Please check it out if you want to turn your ideas into "micro-businesses".
I'm a co-founder of and developer at Stijlbreuk. Stijlbreuk is a digital agency in the Netherlands. We are a digital product building company. At the moment we mainly build products for clients, however we are interesting in building products ourselves. One of our products is Hamok which can be downloaded for free.
https://twitter.com/peerbolte/status/1379535353250451458
Day one started with me drawing a simple mockup in whimsical. The idea of a "shortcut / clipboard desktop application" was already floating in my head for some time, Launch.OS gave me the excuse to actually start building the application. The idea is simple: the application holds multiple pages with tile. Each tile represents a shortcut. The idea is that you can create your own tile by programming it in plain JavaScript or you can find a tile created by the community.
https://twitter.com/peerbolte/status/1379876500367941633?s=21
Although Launch.OS promotes using nocode tools such as bubble, I decided to stick with the skillset that I know: JavaScript and specifically VueJS and Electron. For me it's the easiest way to get something up and running from scratch.
I will not get into too much detail on how to setup the project, but a quick summary as reference:
I scaffolded the vue project using vue-cli and our vue-cli-plugin-stijlbreuk. This setup is very very simple, but has all the tools I need to get started (linting, code-formatting, styling etc.)
By adding the vue-cli-plugin-electron-builder plugin by nklayman we can get started with Electron as well. Electron makes it easy to create cross-platform desktop apps for Windows, Linux and Mac using a webstack. Slack is probably one of the most popular applications out there built using Electron. My goals for this day:
Validate the possibility to manipulate clipboard data using electron
This turned out to be pretty easy. Electron has the clipboard api, which makes reading from and writing to the clipboard really easy.
Implement keyboard short cut to open application Again, Electron has got my back. globalShortcut command is just what I need.
Create some simple working tiles I tried to keep it really simple here. We have an array of objects (tiles) that have some actions. One tile currently looks like this: