This is a weird one. SRPG is a website (web app?). But what if…what if you could run web apps directly on your desktop?
Well, as it turns out, technology has come full circle. A few months back I looked into a system called TideSDK, which acted as a native wrapper around WebKit (the backend for browsers like Chrome) and allowed you to distribute websites/web-apps as native applications. On the face of it, this is slightly ridiculous, and I don’t have much of an argument for why such a thing should exist (beyond “lots of people have experience building software with web tools these days”).
TideSDK died under mysterious circumstances, but the semi-recent release of the Atom.io IDE (built on NodeJS) led to the creation of Electron, which performs similar functions but has the advantages of being 1) not dead, and 2) open source. It took about 3 minutes to install it and get StupidRPG running:
So far so good. Supports full screen, seems to be using a recent (if not the latest) version of Chromium (which means that dumb rainbow text works, unlike in TideSDK), and gives access to the standard debug tools. Nifty.
On to the tougher bit: finding a good reason to view this as anything other than a novelty. It does open up a few interesting features / conveniences. For example:
- Helpers for native file handling (handy for save files/etc, but you can accomplish this without much trouble in a standard website)
- Can add user tasks (basically a context menu on your application icon). Don’t have an immediate use for this.
- Can easily register global keyboard shortcuts.
- Can create native menus and native context menus.
Super exciting, I know. Not a compelling case yet, but it’s been fun to play with. Now that I think of it, Steam doesn’t have nearly enough text adventures…