Show HN: Messenger.com Native | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Messenger.com Native

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27 pointsimd2321 comments

This is just the source code from messenger.com plugged into a node-webkit and in no way "native".

It's "native" in about the same sense that a PhoneGap app is a "native" app.

I've been using Goofy for a couple of months: http://www.goofyapp.com/

This project looks super nice, but native notifications would be nice.

What would be different here to the way that Goofy does it? Goofy handles notifications through it's wrapper and sends them over to the notification center, thus being native notifications. The rest is all a webview, for both of these projects.

Correct, the main differentiator would be the notifications and the additional styling on top of the web view.

Goofy was created before messenger.com and had a bit of extra styling afaik.

There's this as well (OS X only): https://github.com/rsms/fb-mac-messenger

I haven't actually tried it myself yet though...

"Native" it is a webview...

Mouse doesn't seem to work correctly on win64, left click just selects the window and right click gives standard minimize/maximize/close options. Also there's two scroll bars on the right hand side, where there should be zero.

I was able to tab down to the login form and enter credentials, but just got served with the "Please try again later" page, same as I'm getting in the browser at the moment.

But thanks!

I really dig the app, but there's a few features that won't be trivial to implement to get the feel of a native app:

- Native notifications

- Actual window (to replace the "dragging any part of the screen drags the window" and to minimize the app)

- Ability to hide the app away by just closing it

Also I have a big scrollbar on the right, no matter the size of the window (I'm on a 15" MacBook Pro Retina).

Keep up the good work!

- Native notifications

I've noticed Firefox (maybe just developer edition) asks for permission to provide notifications on some sites (specifically Udacity). I have been meaning to see what those are, but I assumed it was native-ish notifications. So maybe that would be possible to implement in a web app, I dunno.

I implemented all of this building a whatsapp desktop version of whatsapp web (also with nw.js) and it is working fine... It's really simple to do. Slack is also a nw.js app if you haven't noticed, so it is the proof that you can get a near-native behavior... =)

I haven't uploaded the repo cos I fear backlash from facebook even if it is just a wrapper... Remember that the guy that built WhatsAPI/yowsup has been banned from fb and whatsapp...

To the mac guys in here, I thought that Fluid[0] was used a lot on the OSX world for creating chromeless apps for websites. Isn't that the case anymore?

[0]: http://fluidapp.com/

Fluidapp browser engine is old and doesn't support things like WebRTC, Web Workers, or modern HTML5 specs. NW.js is based on Chromium so it is basically riding the state-of-the-art wave... you can even pass chrome-flags during compilation for building experimental features.. It's much more powerful...

I'm halfway of building a nw.js FOSS version of fluidapp that acts as wrapper for modern webapps. =)

Please don't keep it limited to osx. I'd love for it to be available on Linux as well. Should be doable since nw.js has nice cross-platform support.

Maybe I am dumb, but how should I run it on Mac? Can't find an executable, only .exe files :(

Okay, changed Gruntfile, there was an error saying it's Windows on Mac.

I created a pull request for this fix as well.

Is this on npm? You should add it if it isn't!

Should I? I don't know why, but I feel it doesn't feets npm. Why would someone want to get this from npm?

Does it have notifications?

Looking at the code, it doesn't other than the audio that Facebook plays within the webview. That's pretty much the entirety of the code anyway:

Definitely a needed project, though.

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