on android adding a webpage to the home screen is convenient and makes dashboards feel like native apps. Not so much on desktop.
Therefore, I created a VERY simple electron app, which basically is really just a chromium instance.
However, it has a tray icon and if you close it, it will minimize to that tray.
Just thought I share this.
Maybe in the future one could add things like notifications or more menu options etc.
Of course, one should add some packaging/bundling...
By the way, this is something different than the electron node-red related projects I have found where also Node-RED is bundled into the electron app as well.
I have only tested on ubuntu. Maybe one can test on mac or windows, since getting the tray to work with ubuntu was quite a hassle (therefore it also has an old electron version, since in the current version, there is a bug such that tray icons don't work in older ubuntu versions)
While interesting, I'm not sure I see the advantage? Electron is a massive overhead when I could simply keep the dashboard in a separate window? I can see some use-cases for bundling with a Node-RED runtime to make a fully local application but not just to have the Dashboard/uibuilder UI on its own - what am I missing?
The advantages of Electron apps are access to local device services and the ability to run offline.
The main advantage for me is that little tray icon, which makes it always accessible, independent from the browser (especially neat on ubuntu, where the icons are in the top right corner)
Furthermore
you don't have the address bar/tabs etc. Feels much more like a native app
you can easily start it on boot without interfering with your browser
About the massive overhead, at least in my testing, opening a new browser window in firefox consumes more resources than my electron app, both CPU and RAM
I see about 100 mb of RAM and very little CPU.
Of course, currently I have 25 windows with 311 tabs open ... in my main browser ... I have a secondary browser open with 32 tabs in a single window for work
