Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

Looks great. Any plan to make it work in a browser instead of having to install an Electron app?

No plans for now, this seems to be the best form to support the features we need.

It was initially a Chrome extension [1] but there were limitations with local file access and UX from jumping around to multiple pages. Very early on I developed this as a web app but it was also difficult to inject styles into iframe, especially for ones that we didn't own directly.

Electron ships Chromium by default so it was easy to leverage into an editable browser plus allowing us to do an infinite canvas style editor. If you know of ways around these limitations please let me know. I'm always trying to figure out a way to turn this into a web app instead.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/onlook/icbcddooibfg...

I'm curious about the chrome extension issues as I'm wondering about creating a project using it, with all the problems it brings with marketing.

What does `UX from jumping around to multiple pages` mean?

You can try it out below. It's not so evident from the demo but there's an inherent flaky feel to using a Chrome extension as a builder. You never feel sure your states are saved correctly and where you can go to review changes.

There's also the platform risk with Chrome Web Store being poorly supported. I've had important updates take up to a week to come out for no transparent reason.

It might just be a UX we have not cracked but it was easy to onboard, hard to stick. It is also unceremoniously open-sourced so if you want to take up the code I'm happy to support that.

https://youtu.be/pUzCOpIE1zQ?feature=shared

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/onlook/icbcddooibfg...

https://github.com/onlook-dev/monorepo

Having it edit local files might be a difficulty of having it work in a browser instead of electron app. That said though, Electron apps I've worked with in the past usually have a "dev" mode already that just serves locally and you hit it with your browser (i.e npm run dev), and that browser allows using the APIs normally not allowed so long as it's being served from localhost. Might be a good solution.

> that just serves locally and you hit it with your browser

This is an interesting take. My interpretation: You can host this on a server, then expose a port remotely which will have all the access of the electron app, making it a pseudo SAAS?

I will need to test this out but this has some cool implications. The other worry is multiple client support but you can just provision a personal instance.

Depending on which APIs you use, that could work. I tried it with Logseq because I really want to have my knowledge base on a VPS which I can access from anywhere via browser, and because of the APIs they use the browser will only allow it if the remote is localhost. You could maybe trick it with a hosts file hack or something, but that would break a lot of (other) stuff that expect localhost to resolve to 127.0.0.1.

I agree that this would be a great addition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com