Chartbuilder Electron

A desktop version of Quartz's Chartbuilder app.

Download

Download the latest on the Releases page. If you're on OS X, select the Darwin release. Because Chartbuilder isn't on npm, it's currently pegged to the latest commit so we can keep track of what version this was built with.

Why

In thinking about newsroom adoption, sometimes simply having something in the dock is so much easier than navigating to a (possibly ugly internal) URL. The dock is the new bookmark.

Things to do

See the issue tracker for more detail. Help welcome!

• Set up auto-updating with electron-gh-releases and command-line releases with publish-release.
• Figure out a way to inject the necessary menu JavaScript into the Chartbuilder JS environment per docs without altering that repo.
• Set default download location to something other than ~/Library/Application Support/Chartbuilder/Downloads/.

Using your customized Chartbuilder build

If your build is on GitHub and the install and build processes haven't deviated from Chartbuilder 2.0, then fork this repository and replace the dependency information in package.json near line 31 with your own info.

For example, if my fork of Chartbuilder lives at http://github.com/mhkeller/Chartbuilder, the package.json line would look like:

  "dependencies": {
    "chartbuilder": "mhkeller/Chartbuilder",
    "electron-debug": "^0.1.1"
  },

Then, follow the Developing instructions below to create your build.

Note on versioning: You can also add a commit sha preceeded by a # to better keep track of which version of that repository we are pulling, but that is optional. Without a specific commit or branch name, it will pull the latest at the time of building. You can also publish your whitelabelled Chartbuilder to npm and call it with a version number, but that isn't usually desirable since your white-labelled version isn't meant for public distribution.

For more information on npm dependencies as Git Urls, check out the npm docs.

Developing

To install everything

npm run init

To run the app locally

npm start

To build out the binaries

npm run build

Builds the app for OS X, Linux, and Windows, using electron-packager.

License

MIT © mhkeller