Future of the Downloader

[hampoelz]

Greetings to everyone who found this downloader 🎉

➡️ Since the release at the beginning of the yeah 2021, the downloader has reached 1,200 downloads in the Microsoft Store 📥 and approx. 2,500 user sessions in the last 6 months 💻. I never thought it would become so popular. ❤️

#️⃣ Sadly no new updates with bug fixes or new features were released. ⚙️ Thats because I'm working on various side projects that are required for a major update i plan to do soon.

❗ If someone is unable to download a book due to a bug and needs it soon, please post a comment and I'll fix it as soon as possible.

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🔜 To my future plans: I plan to make the D4S downloader a cross-platform app with a modular structure and a more modern UI.

Currently the downloader is using the ElectronJS platform as it's easy to load the webpages, get their content and process it using the nodejs backend. Unfortunately electron only supports desktop (Windows, Linux and MacOS).

There is a similar platform called CapacitorJS that allows to build native webapps for Android and IOS, but without the nodejs backend. It's also possible to bring such an app to the desktop using the electron capacitor plugin.

But that doesn't matter much without a nodejs backend. So I started coding a capacitor plugin to add the missing nodejs backend: hampoelz/Capacitor-NodeJS. It's working great so far, but to make it completely cross-platform I'm currently working on adding support for the capacitor electron plugin. This makes it possible to run the app with just one code base on mobile (Android, iOS, iPadOS) and desktop (Windows, Linux, MacOS) operating systems.

With all of this done, I'll make my webapp wrapper cross-platform and port the D4S downloader to it.

It sounds complicated but with this modular structure its simpler to update all of my apps. The capacitor platform with the Electron and Nodejs plugin takes over the cross-platform part. The webapp wrapper handles page loading, user interface, update system, and more (So I have to code / update it once and all apps that use it will automatically reuse it). This means that everything in the digi4school downloader (and other apps) can be updated modularly and this repo will then only contain the actual download algorithm.

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☑️ Checklist for the next version (1.0):

Checklist	Status	Info
Capacitor NodeJS Plugin	Developing	Add NodeJS backend to the CapacitorJS platform
Capacitor BrowserView Plugin	Developing Not yet public	Allow multiple web views in a CapacitorJS app
Universal PWA-Wrapper	Developing	Based on CapacitorJS platform with Electron, NodeJS and BrowserView plugins
Porting D4S-Downloader	Not started	Port Digi4School-Downloader to the PWA-Wrapper to make it universal and modular
Add feature requests	Developing	Issues: #1, #6, #10
Fix reported bugs	Done	Issues: #2, #4, #9
Publish to Microsoft-, Google Play & AltStore	Not started