Electron 0.4 beta 3

I am unhappy to announce the release of Electron 0.4 beta 3.

Umm., what's that? Unhappy?! Well......

I haven't done a release quite some time. Part of this delay is from a complete refactoring of the user interface; but another big chunk of time comes from trying to build Electron with Atom Shell.

AtomShell is a tool that bundles WebKit/Chromium and NodeJS into a single app bundle. This means developers can download a single app with an icon instead of running Electron from the command line. It might even let us put it into the various app stores some day.

Unfortunately, the switch to AtomShell hasn't been as smooth as I would like. The Mac version builds okay but I have yet to get Windows to work. There seems to be some conflict between the version of Node that the native serial port module uses and the version of Node inside of AtomShell. While I'm sure these are solvable problems I don't want to hold back the rest of Electron. It's still useful even if you have to launch it from the command line. So...

Electron 0.4 beta 3

You can download a Mac .app bundle from here, or check out the source and run `node electron` to start it from the command line. The new file browser works as do the various dialogs. Compiler output shows up in the debug panel. You can upload through the serial port but the serial port console is still disabled (due to other bugs I'm still working through).

Undoubtedly many things are still broken during the transition from the old UI to the new. Please, please, please file issues on github. I'll get to them ASAP.

Thanks, Josh

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Posted October 20th, 2014

Tagged: electron arduino nodejs