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Enhancing SUSI Desktop to Display a Loading Animation and Auto-Hide Menu Bar by Default

SUSI Desktop is a cross platform desktop application based on electron which presently uses chat.susi.ai as a submodule and allows the users to interact with susi right from their desktop. The benefits of using chat.susi.ai as a submodule is that it inherits all the features that the webapp offers and thus serves them in a nicely build native application.

Display a loading animation during DOM load.

Electron apps should give a native feel, rather than feeling like they are just rendering some DOM, it would be great if we display a loading animation while the web content is actually loading, as depicted in the gif below is how I implemented that.
Electron provides a nice, easy to use API for handling BrowserWindow, WebContent events. I read through the official docs and came up with a simple solution for this, as depicted in the below snippet.

onload = function () {
	const webview = document.querySelector('webview');
	const loading = document.querySelector('#loading');

	function onStopLoad() {
		loading.classList.add('hide');
	}

	function onStartLoad() {
		loading.classList.remove('hide');
	}

	webview.addEventListener('did-stop-loading', onStopLoad);
	webview.addEventListener('did-start-loading', onStartLoad);
};

Hiding menu bar as default

Menu bars are useful, but are annoying since they take up space in main window, so I hid them by default and users can toggle their display on pressing the Alt key at any point of time, I used the autoHideMenuBar property of BrowserWindow class while creating an object to achieve this.

const win = new BrowserWindow({
	
	show: false,
	autoHideMenuBar: true
});

Resources

1. More information about BrowserWindow class in the official documentation at electron.atom.io.
2. Follow a quick tutorial to kickstart creating apps with electron at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKzBJAowmGg.
3. SUSI Desktop repository at https://github.com/fossasia/susi_desktop.

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