devRantron — Unofficial Desktop App for devrant.io

If you are a developer and you have not heard about https://www.devrant.io, I can confirm that you are missing a great community. It’s a community where developers shares their success stories and frustrations. You also get free stickers if your rants get enough upvotes from the users!

devRantron is the unofficial cross platform desktop application made for devRant by us, the community members.

There is a feature in devRant called “Collab”. This is where the users can share ideas and get collaborators. When the features was first announced, some of us decided to work on a cross-platform desktop application for the website. There was several reasons behind this idea:

1. The official website was missing a lot of features that was available in the mobile app, including notifications.
2. We also wanted some extra features like auto completing username when replying to a comment, saving drafts of our posts so that we can edit them later etc…
3. Some of us wanted to keep the website running in the background so that we can notifications and updates right in the desktop.

So that’s how devRantron began. We chose Electron as our framework for developing it. The reason behind that was we wanted to develop fast without giving up all our time. We had a lot of web developers in devRant, so that helped us to get some contributors.

Rant and Comments

So far about 10 developers have directly contributed and hundreds of others have helped us to test it.

Tech Stack

As mentioned above, the app is built of Electron. Inside the hood, we use these libraries:

1. React v16 (Redux, Router, Thunk)
2. SASS for styling
3. electron-builder for packaging and auto updating the application
4. Webpack for building
5. ESlint for linting
6. Travis CI for macOS and Linux packaging, AppVeyor for Windows packaging.

All our styles are hand made. We don’t use any CSS frameworks. We chose React because I know it quite well and it’s very popular amongst developers right now. Electron-builder has helped us enormously to deal with packaging for different OS and auto updating the application in certain OS.

There are some other features that we didn’t use any library for. For example, for our autocomplete feature is made by us.

User Profile

Thanks to our designer Hampus Lundqvist, we have a gorgeous design for our application. We tried to make it as modern looking as possible. We also tried to make the best use of the extra space in desktop.

You can see our project here: https://github.com/tahnik/devRantron

If you would to try our application, you have to sign up at https://devrant.io first. Then you can get the latest release of our application from GitHub or from here: https://devrantron.firebaseapp.com

If you like the application, don’t forget to star the repository :)