Use the System Tray

[jgaehring]

Discussed in #20

^{Originally posted by jgaehring August 26, 2023}
I keep coming back to the thought, since this is meant to be a pretty minimal UI, at least for now, and we really want to focus future Runrig work towards integrations with other FOSS projects, what if we aimed towards making the EWS an app that was primarily launched from the system tray?

It looks like there is plenty of support and prior art for doing this kind of thing in Tauri:

• Tauri Docs: System Tray
• Clippy, "Clipboard Manager built with Rust & Typescript"
• And there are several other system-tray-centric apps listed under awesome-tauri#utilities

The more I think about it, the more I like how this paradigm gels with Runrig's stated aim of being "the mortar joining these technological building blocks together, while reinforcing and giving shape to the whole." I am very wary of adding notifications, but if it was setup to provide passive alerts from the system tray, then we could place links to other platforms there in the tray's menu, like a link to their crop plan on farmOS or a batch of orders on Open Food Network. We could still have our own minimal UI for giving a general overview, but users could entirely bypass that to go to the platform that needs their attention most.

[jgaehring]

The other possibility is to start a fresh project that could share the same storage layer but be geared towards being a "system-tray-first" application that could eventually supersede this project, or perhaps integrate it as an extension via some sort of plugin system.

[jgaehring]

As I mentioned in our Matrix room just now, I realized earlier today that Atomic Data had a distributable of their server implementation embedded in a Tarui desktop app:
https://github.com/atomicdata-dev/atomic-server/tree/59fef87ed06dc28289bff2925e55c5036f99b5cd/desktop

However, they deprecated it a few months ago:
atomicdata-dev/atomic-server#718

It seemed similarly geared toward using Tauri's system tray API to provide a status indicator, updated upon remote changes to their data:
https://docs.atomicdata.dev/roadmap.html?highlight=desktop#history