How do I get a developer build up and running?

[pieterdd]

Hi! I was toying around with SVGs so I could perhaps contribute a "dynamic tray icon" feature where the cup starts full and gradually empties until the next break approaches, allowing users to better anticipate breaks.

I was wondering though, how do I get a dev build up and running? I tried npm run build followed by npm run start but I'm getting errors about icon.png not being present in the node_modules\electron\dist\resources\app\resources\tray directory. I'm building on Windows 10 (PowerShell, not WSL).

[tom-james-watson]

That sounds like a really cool idea! Development docs are here: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/breaktimer-app/blob/master/DEVELOPMENT.md.

Should just be npm i followed by npm run dev.

I'm actually currently doing a big upgrade of the app and potentially a lot of the code will change, but if you produce something that is nice and modular it shouldn't be a problem integrating it in.

One thing you'll want to check is whether an svg can actually be used as a tray icon on all 3 supported platforms. It seems like it may not be.

[tom-james-watson]

I wonder if there is some magic that can be done with multiple pngs though.

[pieterdd]

Thanks, will take a look again when I have time.

As for using PNGs for compatibility reasons: seems like a good idea. I suppose that generating them for 100%, 90%, 80%, ..., 10% and 0% will be a good enough approximation. I'll fire up my improvised SVG generator and see if I can make decent PNGs from it.

[pieterdd]

Some test renders:

[danielaj28]

Looks great

[tom-james-watson]

That looks so awesome! We'd need pngs of each one, along with ideally a source file so we can recreate them.

For macOS the tray icon needs to be monochrome: so just either solid black or transparent. MacOS then auto recolours it depending on your theme. See the tray-iconTemplate files here: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/breaktimer-app/tree/master/resources/tray. So that would require a separate set of icons. We could always just not support macOS for the dynamic icon though if you don't want to make that.