I'm still putting the pieces back from the disk crash that happened earlier in May. The rainbow cursor mess. 

The other day I wanted to do some work with Electron. 

There's an Electron version of the 1999.io app. 

I wanted to have another look at that, and another project I'm working on that's also Electron-based.

So I needed to reinstall Electron. So I did. And nothing worked.

Now the question is, did I do something weird when I last installed Electron that I'm now forgetting. I looked back over my notes. Nothing obvious.

So I waited for a fresh start, and sat down with a nice glass of iced coffee, and set about figuring out what was wrong.

I'll save all the blind alleys and wrong guesses.

Two things changed. 

1. I call crashReporter at the beginning of my main routine. I do it because all the example code does it. Amazingly this was causing the first crash. Apparently this (now?) requires a companyName value be set somewhere. I read somewhere that you could just take it out, so I did, and now my apps got a lot further.
2. One of them opens a dialog. It was failing. On investigation I found the call to find the remote module was failing. I found another way to do it, and that worked but then it failed on the call to the dialog module. 

Now, instead of this:

var remote = require ("remote");

var dialog = remote.require ("dialog"); 

You now say:

var remote = require ("electron").remote;

var dialog = remote.dialog; 

Apparently I had an older version of Electron and there was a breaking change in an intervening version. I hate it when that happens. Look away for awhile and your app breaks in mysterious ways. Oy.

Anyway now it's documented. ;-)