MacGap: Desktop WebKit wrapper for HTML/CSS/JS applications

by maccman • 15 years ago

144 35 15 years ago

mceachen• 15 years ago

Sitting next to the developer of MacGap (we both work at Twitter), the first thing that I asked was "what about Fluid?" http://fluidapp.com/ -- and Alex's first retort was that this was open source, and free.

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

"MacGap was forked/ported from Phonegap-mac. It's under the same license (MIT)."

I'm more curious why he forked Phonegap-mac?

maccman4• 15 years ago

It's a good point, but I felt that it was enough of a code change to fork - and callback-mac wasn't getting that much love (or accepting pull requests). However, it may be that that project gets merged back in, as I might be made the official maintainer.

tvon• 15 years ago

Fluid is just a browser that opens to a specific URL, there is no way to distribute with it (aside from just publishing a webapp).

pudquick• 15 years ago

Actually, back in the pre-1.0 versions, you could.

See the archived changelog here: http://www.myosxfreeware.com/fluid-04/

Specifically "FluidInstance.app: SSBs can now run local Ruby on Rails webapps."

There used to be a way to package up a RoR app inside the application contents and distribute that as your app. No need for an actual hosted website.

However - the feature was poorly documented and never really taken advantage of. Since they went 1.0, I believe it's also been removed.

switz• 15 years ago

Fluid is great, but can be verrrrrrry buggy. I know the developer that makes it, and he's a great guy. I've been waiting for someone to put out a more solid replacement and hopefully this is it.

c_t_montgomery• 15 years ago

Raven isn't bad - some prefer it over Fluid. I don't, but I still think it's a solid replacement.

http://raven.io/

sjs382• 15 years ago

Does something like this exist for windows?

taskstrike4• 15 years ago

Yes, https://github.com/davejohnson/phonegap-windows

rjd• 15 years ago

You can easily embedd internet explorer frames in winforms and WPF. If you're using Visual studio its almost a drag and drop affair. To gain things like system wide notifications you will need to use interop to get to the win32 libs, but its fairly straight forward and well documented.

As far as I'm aware (and I'm speculating from articles I've read) is that full support for HTML apps is coming in Windows 8.

EDIT: or just use the other link provided in the other comment which has webkit support :)

hdragomir• 15 years ago

dare I say Adobe Air?

I does exist...

vena• 15 years ago

appcelerator titanium, i'd guess - http://www.appcelerator.com/

kingofspain• 15 years ago

Titanium desktop has the feel of being abandoned - even if not officially the case. For anything non-trivial, you're entering a world of hurt.

Dysiode• 15 years ago

I've had more luck with the QtWebKit Bridge: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7-snapshot/qtwebkit-bridge.html than other options (primarily Titanium).

It's a bit more complicated and requires you to get familiar with Qt's paradigms for things like resource management (I'm still struggling with how to access files outside a qrc), but it offers infinitely more flexibility by exposing the entirety of Qt (and C++) to you as needed.

For example, I wanted to write a frameless app with edge snapping. The two problems I ran across were:

- First, when expanding a window the mouse would leave the web widget and so Titanium would stop sending mouse events (as it should). To fix that I had to wrap my content and center it in a larger transparent <body> and then account for that in the movement code. Ugly, but do able.

- And then, edge snapping on the other hand is impossible. Titanium doesn't handle multiple monitors very well. In-order to get the dimensions of a desktop you've dragged into you have to drop it first and even then it's relative to the upper left corner of the primary display.

I realize these are very specific issues but they're trivial in Qt (I handle resizing and dragging in Qt so mouse position is no longer an issue, and QDesktop is extremely straightforward).

Furthermore, not every library is available in Javascript so it can be useful to fall back to C++. I'm still using mustache.js for templating but I won't be using Strophe.js for my jabber library, I can instead use quicker C++ power library (I'd like to use libpurple but that's a whole other mess itself).

MacGap: Desktop WebKit wrapper for HTML/CSS/JS applications

Related Stories