fmartingr/natif

Run websites as if they where native OS applications

Natif

Load webpages as if they where native OS applications.

Summary

From some time on, everything is moving to the web. We are losing desktop applications as part of our workflow and even if that's a good thing for some, there are other that could be just applications.

I want to override that barrier with a single app, you just ran it with the URL of the site you want to convert to a native application and it will just launch a browser without any menubar and an isolated session environment for that particular URL so logins are mantained when you reopen the app.

The main use case for now is to create custom script launchers for apps using the natif command to launch them instead of having lot's of executables around there.

Installation

You can either download the latest binaries from the latest release or build them for your platform if they are not there.

Usage

Run the application with the URL you want to run as an OS application

$ natif https://www.irccloud.com/

Development

Prepare the development environment

You just need to clone the repository to your local machine.

git clone [email protected]/fmartingr/natif.git
cd natif
make setup

Remember that if you want to contribute to the project you need to fork it and clone from your username/organization.

After that, you can run the app with npm start.

Building binaries

Natif uses electron-packager to easily build binaries for any platform, if you want to build the specific binaries for yours because they are not on the releases page you can use this command:

make build_auto

natif's Issues

Add help to show when natif is executed without url

As of today when natif is executed without an url, it raises an error:

A JavaScript error occurred in the main process
Uncaught Exception:
TypeError: Cannot read property 'replace' of undefined
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/aranda/projects/natif-linux-x64/resources/app/main.js:18:30)
    at Module._compile (module.js:556:32)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:565:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:473:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:432:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:424:3)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/aranda/projects/natif-linux-x64/resources/electron.asar/browser/init.js:171:8)
    at Module._compile (module.js:556:32)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:565:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:473:32)

Maybe adding a short help or command usage description will:

1. avoid this behavior from happening
2. ...help

Ability to prepend custom name to window title

Since I change windows using a window switcher, for some sites is difficult to keep track since the executable is natif and the window title is controlled by the site.

Research if using a custom window title is possible.

Set initial window height & lenght

It would be nice to execute natif with a fixed browser size (height, lenght).
Ex: natif http://myurl.com -w 1024 -l 800

In addition to that, a fixed screen position would be nice too. For example some behavior similar to rofi's.

Site todoist.com returns error when response is OK on first login using google account

#!/bin/bash
natif https://todoist.com/app

Returns error code 0, summary OK. Next run works as expected.

Links open in a new electron BrowserWindow instead of in the browser

Netflix is not working, widevine not found

Netflix is not working and is one of the main sites I wanted to use, the app need to be packaged with the widevine component as specified here:

https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/master/docs/tutorial/using-widevine-cdm-plugin.md

update chromium

Some websites (such as gmail) detect the embbeded chromium as an older version and suggest to update it.