Starting Plopper

A couple of weeks ago, I started building an application with Electron. After a couple of weeks, I'm still enjoying developing in it.

It's a hobby project named Plopper. It is a tool to help you organize ideas. I'm thinking that it will be to graph structures what trello is to list-of-lists.

Progress has been ok. Translation: I haven't been blocked so badly that I wanted to give up on the project.

I'm not an experienced web developer, so I'm always getting tripped up by one thing or another. For example, when I was using the Node.js file system module, I was stupidly expecting the async tool to work in a synchronous manner. Let's just say that it was a good learning and debugging experience.

There have been more fundamental things I'm not sure about either. I am still not sure on how to manage the state of my application. When a user interacts with my application, I can save the state in long term storage in a file (probably a database in the future), but what do I do for intermediate state changes? For now, I've resorted to using some global variables that are around for the life of the application run.

I think the success of my application will depend a lot on the graphical user interface. If it's simple, intuitive, snappy and fun, I think it can work. So, I've been playing a lot with the html5 canvas. You are given rudimentary tools to work with the canvas, like drawing rectangles, lines and text. It's basic, but easy to understand, so I like it. It seems like you could nearly render an entire application using the canvas alone. I'm still feeling out how best to use the canvas.