What it is: River5 running on the desktop in Electron.
What is Electron: It's a very nice environment that combines Node.js and Chrome.
Examples of other Electron apps: Slack, WordPress, the Atom editor.
Why Electron is so nice: JavaScript for the UI and JavaScript for the server software, makes for happy JavaScript programmer. :balloon:
The idea: Makes it possible for someone with zero experience with Node to set up River5 on their desktop.
Here's a quick video demo of what it's like to start up with Electric River.
Is this new? Not exactly. I had a River aggregator running in Frontier as part of the Radio UserLand product 15 years ago! So yeah it's not new.
There's a lot of power in there -- it is the full unmodified River5 from the GitHub site. When you lift the hood there's your Lists folder, Data folder, Rivers folder, all the pieces are there, and all the generality. While we have a UI for editing one list, you can have as many lists as you like.
There will also be a new release of River5 coming with this, with the addition of three new callbacks that allow us to do things a bit more efficiently because the reading and configuring app is running in the same process as the server.
I approached this project once before, a couple of years ago, but I didn't have enough experience with Electron, Node and JavaScript to trust the result. Now I am reasonably confident that this will work.
The plan: I want to get a fresh start on this tomorrow morning, review the software, make sure there aren't any loose ends I still need to tie up, then I'll post a link to the download page here and on the River5 mail list.
At first there will only be a Mac version, but I hope a Linux and Windows version will follow soon after.
The Mac version is ready.
Let's have fun! :balloon: