serialport VS Electron

Everything works very well, except for one detail: the node-serialport doesn't work in Android+Termux environment. You can't use RS232, MODBUS, RS422, or RS485 !!! See here the open issue,

Strangely enough it does package fine with electron-builder but does not work in dev mode. The same happens when I try to use https://serialport.io/ which is also another module where you could achieve device detection.

We use node-serialport instead of the WebSerial API, since it was only recently that Electron supported WebSerial permission overrides to make things like a 'devices screen' viable. The WebBluetooth APIs are still in a situation where you have to do polling shenanigans to get a full device list. I've found the mutated permissions system leaves a lot to be desired when debugging, whereas the NAPI modules are a lot more straightforward.

It really depends. The stuff I'm doing in this video for example is writing a driver stack for a device called the Bus Pirate. Communication is done over serial (which is easy in node with the serialport library). The bus pirate is a device that allows you to talk to other devices over different protocols, including SPI, I2C, and OneWire (as well as bit banging, where you control some electrical signals directly any way you want using software). So while it's not something you'd do directly in production, you can actually test communication with devices in JS in a fast, iterative, interactive way without having to use a microcontroller. You can actually figure out all of your design decisions there and port your code to the microcontroller later if you're building some kind of embedded system device, potentially saving a lot of time and debugging.

Turns out, there is: https://github.com/serialport/node-serialport/issues/2259

We use node-serialport for USB serial communications. It's included in the transport manager renderer process. The installation guide and docs should be good enough to get you started. Hopefully serialport has prebuilds for the combination of system and electron version you're trying. We had to setup an internal prebuilds system and CDN for our app since we'd often find ourselves ahead of the prebuilt versions for node-serialport. Alternatively you can build from source.

The team at Electron have been faithfully shipping new releases almost every single month. I think they had Christmas off 🤔. This popular framework has developers writing cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The latest update depreciates some process events, and added new modules, APIs, methods, and more. Read into all the changes in the Electron release notes. This month, Electron also introduced a new formal RFC process.

VS Code has been crashing at launch in Wayland since more than eight months ago:

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/37531

So we talked a lot about the Atomic Design Principle, but you could just use that in any system and start creating. You could have Angular components, React Components, and Vue Components. But if you notice these don't easily work Everwhere. So the solution is to use Web Components because the modern browser can already understand these, and any Front-End framework can then utilize these components. You can use Electron for desktop (Slack, VSCode), PWA for both Android and iOS, and across all browsers Can I Use.

I'm noticing a significant boost in performance, crisper text, and better power savings. The only shortcoming is that the window which Figma will run on will lose its shadow. This is due to a technical limitation with frameless windows on Linux.

For the longest time, building desktop apps was a daunting task to web developers. That is, until technologies like Electron made creating these apps more approachable to a wider audience. Today, we’ve got a wide array of native applications built with solutions like Electron, Tauri, Capacitor, and many more. While these are great solutions, sometimes configuration can be tricky and the applications we create can become somewhat bloated in terms of memory usage.

Electron patch for version 27: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/39823

It does, see [0]. Fun fact: Signal desktop, which uses Electron under the hood, is running without sandbox on Linux [1][2].

[0] https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/39824

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/5195

[2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/4381

Turns out, there is an issue with the electron window not returning focus correctly on mac - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/5495. The trick to solving is to treat quick capture as a screensaver. When closing, you hide it by setting the opacity to 0 and sending hide: command to the first responder.

Open since 2016! https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8124