Pulse SMS - Desktop

An Electron app that wraps the Pulse web app. With this desktop implementation, you get:

Native notifications through persistent web socket
Notification customizations
Notification snooze support
Spell check
Always active window
Tray/Menu Bar support
Unread badge support for Mac and Linux
Hidden menu bar option for Windows and Linux

The desktop app is built on top of Electron's BrowserView, rather than Chromium's webview.

Build Instructions

Use Yarn as the package manager:

$ npm install yarn -g
$ yarn

Run the app:

$ yarn start

The app will only run if you have shut down any other instances. To ensure that only one web socket connection is made and managed, only a single instance of Pulse is allowed to run. If you use yarn start while another instance is running, it will simply display the window of that old instance, instead of starting the app.

Packaging Information

To package the apps for each platform:

$ yarn

// MacOS (dmg)
$ yarn build-mac

// Windows (installer with 32 and 64 bit support)
$ yarn build-windows

// Linux (deb and AppImage)
$ yarn build-linux

Notes on Building for Mac

With MacOS Catalina (10.14.5), Apple requires DMG files to be notarized by the distributer. The files that I distribute are all signed and notarized by me.

If you are looking to develop the app yourself, you can debug and run the app through yarn start without issue. However, if you want to make a signed executable (yarn build-mac), you will need to set up your Apple ID and password for the notarization process.

To do this, you will first need a valid Apple developer account. You can sign up at https://developer.apple.com. You will need to use Xcode to export your new developer signing information and add it to your keychain.

You will then need to generate an app-specific password for that Apple ID. This is not the same as the password that you use to sign in to your developer account. You can create this app-specific password, here: https://appleid.apple.com

After completing those two steps, create a .env file in the root of this project. It should look something like:

APPLEID=test@someemail.com
APPLEIDPASS=xxxx-tttt-vvvv-aaaa

Contributing

Please fork this repository and contribute back using pull requests. Features can be requested using issues on our Pulse platform issue tracker, rather than creating issues directly on this repo: https://github.com/klinker-apps/messenger-issues.

This project was originally a JavaScript project and I am not a big fan of JavaScript. As such, the project now uses Typescript. Many things aren't structured in a very Typescript-y way. I will continue to improve this, as I have time. Pull requests would be more than welcome, to make the app more Typescript-y.

License