DeskWeb

Inspiration

We want more cool stuff showing up on our desktops.
Like, some instagram photos on your feed.

What it does

You write a website, we live-update it to your desktop background. DeskWeb provides an infrastructure that lets you put any website components on your desktop background, agnostic of frameworks/langauges.

How I built it

We built the OS X part first, which live-updates your desktop background by watching on an image file change.

Then we built the frontend, which is a website that sends hot updates to the OS X part, which then updates the desktop background.

Challenges I ran into

1. How to interface between Swift and Node.js
2. How to wait for JS to load and populate the DOM so we could take pictures in a headless-browser.
3. Managing multiple servers which communicate with each other.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

1. Live updating your desktop using HTML/CSS/JS website!
2. Coding swift for the first time and successfully glued it to Node.js so we could use OS X API to live-update desktop background.
3. Providing an infrastructure to build your own desktop with unmatched flexbility.

What I learned

1. OS X & Node.js
2. headless-browser scripting.
3. Image processing.
4. Messaging between servers.

What's next for DeskWeb

• Polish it so other people can have cool desktops, too!

Built With

• babel
• express.js
• instagram
• jade
• javascript
• jquery
• node.js
• os-x
• react
• webshots