Benefits vs Fluid.app?

[jwheare]

Hi, one of the IRCCloud team here. Are there any advantages to doing this over just using a Fluid wrapper? We already add the badge/notification hooks for fluid and it's quite widely used. I'm a bit loathe to keep adding more custom hooks for different wrapper frameworks.

[colindean]

I'm not sure that I know enough about Fluid to speak intelligently on it. I'm doing some very quick research here, so I might miss something major.

• MacGap API Reference
• Fluid API Reference

They both can show a badge, play sounds, and growl-notify. Fluid seems to more easily allow userscripts, but most of its API seems to be limited to execution by userscripts. MacGap doesn't seem to expose that capability yet. Fluid can add items to the dock menu, and MacGap cannot right now. That's pretty much where the list of Fluid features ends.

MacGap can do stuff with the window, use native notifications, handle OSX wake/sleep/focus events, and preserve user preferences. It can also insert and remove things from the menu bar.

It feels like Fluid is meant more for the common passerby who wants to create an app, while MacGap is useful for companies who want to offer a "Mac app" that feels like a native app, without having to invest significant time in doing anything more than setting a refresh URL in an HTML file, perhaps adding a couple of hooks that make it more integrated.

TL;DR MacGap seems to have more capabilities and is meant to be an "official app," suitable for release onto the Mac App Store.

[jwheare]

Makes sense. Having looked into the project a bit more, I'd be happy to add the calls to the macgap api to fix #3 #4 and #6

[colindean]

😁😁😁😁😁👍👍👍👍

[colindean]

Let me know when you do this... I've realized that I cannot live without desktop notifications of some kind and this little app can't provide them yet, so I'm falling back to a pinned Chrome tab until such a time that notifications are available!