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**Jerod Santo:** That's where you're getting. I agree. |
**Mat Ryer:** That's where I'm getting. Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** He's also famous for the shortest story, I believe, ever... "For sale, baby shoes. Never worn." |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a little bit dark, so sorry about that. |
**Jerod Santo:** You killed the mood, Adam... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, my bad. |
**Mat Ryer:** No, but that's kind of beautiful. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the thing though - writing code and writing words though is very... I think you have to draw a parallel there, because I think famously Hemingway also said "You're always writing. Just get it out there. Whatever it is, just get it out there." Because it's like temporary art until it's perceiv... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The argument is contextual. |
**Mat Ryer:** \[32:02\] Yeah. You just learn. It's what you learn in that process. And honestly, even to the point where I really resist designing software too much. There is obviously value in designing software, and you should be designing software, but you can definitely very easily over-design upfront, and then you... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Mat Ryer:** So yeah, I think through that process and the learning that pops out of that, and the opportunities that pop out, too... I didn't design xbar the way it was. I got there because I've tried to make a simple web request, using Objective-C, and I couldn't do it because of NSURLRequest object didn't make any ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, I know you're not... That's why it's funny. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, so I took the opportunity then. |
**Jerod Santo:** So is Wails cross-platform then? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yes, Wails is cross-platform, which means xbar will be cross-platform, and that is also very exciting. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's cool... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yes. |
**Jerod Santo:** So you get that for free. So Bitbar - and xbar today - is a macOS menu bar app, right? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yes, that's right. But in the future, it will become cross-platform. And of course, all the plugins won't necessarily make sense, because a lot of them are specific to a Mac, so there will have to be some way -- there's actually metadata inside each plugin... And I actually wouldn't mind spending some tim... |
**Jerod Santo:** Totally. |
**Mat Ryer:** It kind of has its own benefits, too. But there's metadata in there, essentially, inside the plugin somewhere. It can be anywhere in the code, usually in the comments, so you can't see it... And of course, the comments can look like anything, because you can write plugins in any language. So we'll probabl... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I was gonna say, it could be multiple platforms even. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** One plugin. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So xbar parses arbitrary language comments in order to extract metadata? That sounds like a bad idea. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, does it? Well, it worked... |
**Jerod Santo:** It just sounds harder than just like "Well, why don't you just define a format for metadata?" |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh no, there is a format, but it's like XML tags, but they can just appear anywhere in file. It's very loose... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, okay. I thought you meant you could just willy-nilly, put a comment wherever you want... Because like you said, different languages indicate comments in different ways. Okay... That doesn't sound quite so bad. It sounded pretty bad at first, so thank you for clarifying. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yes, that's alright. But that's nice, because in xbar we added variable support. One of the things that lots of the plugins had was if you had to configure something - like, if one of them is a currency, it shows you the currency rate, so you could edit the script and choose the currency that you wanna se... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Mat Ryer:** So that's a new feature that came from xbar, that we didn't have in Bitbar. |
**Jerod Santo:** So tell us more about the feel and the process of writing Go with Wails in order to produce what will be a cross-platform, but is a desktop application. You said it's like web technologies. Can you tell us what that felt like to use Wails, and to build a Go project that's gonna run on a Mac as a binary... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, yeah. Well, fortunately, the Wails project does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. I mean, you essentially can use your own UI frameworks, and I quite enjoy building UIs as well. I got into Svelte, which is a UI JavaScript framework, and it has a similar philosophy as Go, in that it tries to be min... |
\[36:14\] And it also has this other effect that I'm sure is well known - it basically does a lot of its work at compile-time, not at runtime. So in theory that makes the projects much faster when you use them. And to be honest, you do notice that I think they're very snappy UIs when you use Svelte... |
So that was it. Frontend was Svelte. There's an API that Wails gives you. You can just expose Go methods to the frontend and call them in JavaScript. It's all transparent, so it's very easy, and it's kind of like a promise API, so you make a call to the backend, you get back a promise... If there's an error, then you u... |
There's a bit of work to do, like to turn it into a Mac app... You have to pu tit into a certain folder, with extra bits of metadata, and things... But it's quite trivial, and the Wails project really helps do that. So it felt very natural to me, because I build a lot of server-client applications like that, and it's a... |
Lee had to do work in Wails to support menus, because it wasn't a priority. If you think about a desktop app, accessing the menu bar is not really something that most apps do. So we made a deal and he agreed to add support to Wails for that, and in exchange I sent him a MacBook M1. |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice. |
**Mat Ryer:** A MacBook Air. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice. |
**Mat Ryer:** It was alright, it was a good deal. |
**Jerod Santo:** It was a good deal for both of you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a good sponsor right there... |
**Mat Ryer:** Well, he also wanted to make sure Wails worked natively on M1, so it was really a good kind of win/win all around situation... So that was nice. And he's a genuinely lovely bloke as well, which - it helps when you like people. |
**Jerod Santo:** And he regrets nothing. |
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