Tally Ho!

It is all well and good to talk about this, but it came time to do something. And pick up a new framework along the way. Anyone who has known me for a while and had any talks about code knows I’ve always had some weird disconnect with GUI programming. There’s some weird cognitive blocker there that has always made it impossible for me to build good GUI code. This is usually what kills most of my non-utility project ideas that need to extend beyond the command line – or at least other users.

Enter Electron

Electron is a node.js based framework that was spun out of github’s most awesome Atom programmer’s editor. The TL;DR version is Electron lets you develop GUI applications as you would a web app, based on Chrome and javascript. With Electron I was able to leverage some meager skills I had with server-side and browser-side javascript and 20+ years of off and on work with HTML. Now Electron is not as fast as native code and has some detractors ( that feel much like the complaints you used to hear about Visual Coders before that became the way to do things )  with good and not so good complaints about it. But it produces usable results, produces multi-platform results, and most importantly, works in a way my busted brain can handle. 🙂 Other folks have had similar luck.

And?

Well, it is getting there. It’s not quite demonstration worthy and there is a good bit of ugly stubbing and non-prettified UI in place still. What it does have:

• Open and parse basic metadata in a PDF. This is frequently not provided in a practical manner in most of the PDFs I’ve tested with so far. It also pulls the first page, assuming it is a cover.
• Edit several types of metadata for the file. Author, Publisher, etc. Based on my previous postings.
• Plugins! So far only the metadata search plugin interface has been implemented. I expect to also implement hooks for submission plugins ( so you can post a rating or submit a title to the RCCDB ) and storage plugins that will help organize your files on the file system.
• Launch your PDF reader

What next?

Aside from the obvious cosmetics, I’d like to see about getting more metadata from other sites before moving on to the RCCDB submission plugin. After that, I’ll go nuts and tackle a storage plugin as that’s pretty much what started this mess in the first place. Then, maybe, testers? Who knows.

If you have any PDF purchase sites that you think I should look at building a metadata plugin against, let me know!