Adam Lynch

I started out as a web developer, and that’s now one part of what I do as a full-stack developer, but never had I imagined I’d create things for the desktop. I love the web. I love how altruistic our community is, how it embraces open-source, testing and pushing the envelope. I love discovering beautiful websites and powerful apps. When I was first tasked with creating a desktop app, I was apprehensive and intimidated. It seemed like it would be difficult, or at least… different.   Read more

The term “serverless” has been trendy for a while now. In this post, I’m going to share my experience dabbling with serverless architecture, specifically for handling crash reports from Electron apps. The conference I attend about two or…...   Read more

Electron combines Chromium and Node.js, empowering you to create real desktop apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which integrate tightly into the desktop environment. In Developing an Electron Edge, we cover all things Electron. We breakdown what Electron is and what you can achieve with it over a typical desktop or Web app. Not only will we cover the complete development process from beginning to end, but the packaging and delivery of your app as well. You’ll discover some platform specific issues, learn how to deploy automatic updates, and even take a look at using one codebase for the desktop and the Web.   Get the book

It has been about a year since we had A peek under the hood of Teamwork Chat. Since then, we’ve added a few nice features, fixed some bugs, and introduced a couple. You know how it goes. More…...   Read more

Remember Clippy? First shipped with Windows 97, Clippy was a “smart” assistant for Microsoft Office. A selfless shape-shifting paperclip who would appear out of nowhere to help you in any way it could. And how did you treat…...   Read more

Yes, NW.js does support transparency, albeit it is disabled by default. One way to enable transparency is to use the transparency property to your application's manifest like this...   Read more

The NW.js GUI library provides an "App" API, which contains a variety of methods and properties, some of which are essential to pretty much any app, and some have more obscure use cases. You can access the API as follows...   Read more

There are various reasons why you might want to detect which platform or operating system your NW.js app is currently being ran on. Your keyboard shortcuts or UI may differ per platform, you might want to store files in platform-specific directories on disk, etc. Thanks to node's (or io.js') os module, it isn't too difficult.   Read more

NW.js is great for creating desktop applications using Web app technologies. If you're not familiar with NW.js, I'd advise you to read an introductory article like Creating Your First Desktop App With HTML, JS and Node-WebKit to get a good base first. This is a slightly more advanced article intended for anyone interested into distributing their NW.js app to Windows users.   Read more

You might have been unfortunate enough to learn that Windows has a 256 character limit on file paths. You could've ran into this problem locally or on end users' machines. There's no real workaround but there are preventive measures you can take. Even if you haven't, feel free to take pleasure from reading my horror story.   Read more

I love Gulp. It’s great in so many ways and for so many purposes. I’ve been putting off writing a post on it forever. There’s just too much to write about; I could write a book on it…...   Read more

You might have been unfortunate enough to learn that Windows has a 256 character limit on file paths. You could've ran into this problem locally or on end users' machines. There's no real workaround but there are preventive measures you can take. Even if you haven't, feel free to take pleasure from reading my horror story.   Read more

You might have seen Ben Johnson’s tweet. I’m sorry everyone, I’ve made a module which makes this a lot easier to do. It’s called Olc. “Olc” is the Irish word for “bad” and is inconspicious enough to go…...   Read more

JetBrains IDEs are the best. IntelliJ, Android Studio, PHPStorm, PyCharm, and so on. I use IntelliJ Ultimate myself, which is kind of like all of their IDEs in one. One of the things I love about any JetBrains…...   Read more

You might have been unfortunate enough to learn that Windows has a 256-character limit on file paths. You could’ve run into this problem locally or on end users’ machines. We’ve created a simple little module called gulp-path-length to…...   Read more

The idea was to build a chat application of our own. A whole new standalone product to raise the bar for team communication and collaboration. From the beginning, Teamwork Chat was intended to tie our whole suite of…...   Read more

The first project at Teamwork to use CoffeeScript was the Teamwork.com iPad app. Fast forward two years. We now have web, mobile and even desktop apps built with CoffeeScript. If you need a primer, there’s no better place…...   Read more

How do you manage your third-party assets? With my simple setup, all I have to do is run one command and reload the page. Lets take a look at managing our third-party dependencies with Bower and preprocessing them…...   Read more