jamesscottbrown / trrracer

A tool for documenting the visualization design process as a Design Study Trace.

Trrracer

Trrracer is a tool for documenting the visualization design process as a Design Study Trace.

It is currently a prototype under active development.

It is implemented as a cross-platform desktop application written in TypeScript using the Electron framework and the React library.

Implementing as a desktop application has two main advantages:

• it means that there is no need to deploy a server to use the software
• it means a Trrrace can be edited offline (e.g., whilst travelling)
• it gives Trrrace access to system APIs to do things like take screenshots

Downloading binaries

After each push or merge to the master branch, a GitHub Action runs to build binaries, an uploads these as assets for a draft release.

You can click on "Assets" on the Releases page, download the appropriate file for your platform (.exe for windows, .dmg for macOS, .AppImage for linux), and double-click to run (if using linux, you will need to make the downloadable file executable first).

(uploading of these assets sometimes fails due to this issue )

Development

To install, clone the repo via git and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/jamesscottbrown/trrracer.git
cd trrracer
yarn

To start the app in the dev environment:

yarn start

To package apps for the local platform:

yarn package

About

The initial scaffolding for this app was based on the Electron React Boilerplate template, which uses Electron, React, React Router, Webpack and React Fast Refresh.