Harper for Windows

This is a fol­low-up to a re­cent post where I dis­cussed the ben­e­fits of pri­or­i­tiz­ing Windows sup­port for Harper Desktop. You can read that post by click­ing here.

I am pleased to say that Harper Desktop for Windows is com­ing along beau­ti­fully. It is not ready yet, but I plan to launch it in beta soon. To keep my­self ac­count­able, I am set­ting a hard launch date of August 28th.

If you are on ma­cOS, you will be pleased to know that the ma­cOS app is al­ready out and ready for your feed­back.

Let’s Take a Look

As you can see, we have the most crit­i­cal steps work­ing re­li­ably.

• We can read text from an ar­bi­trary ap­pli­ca­tion (in this case, Notepad).
• We can ren­der high­lights over that text.
• We can ap­ply or dis­miss sug­ges­tions at the user’s dis­cre­tion.

There are still some com­po­nents that need to be de­bugged. Namely, we need to be able to dis­able gram­mar check­ing in un­sup­ported ap­pli­ca­tions. Right now, if you open up YouTube or Paint, Harper will try to gram­mar check those im­ages. Obviously, that is not de­sir­able. In the video, you can also see that Notepad’s built-in spell checker can shove it­self in front of Harper’s UI. This is be­cause of a race con­di­tion be­tween Notepad and Harper. I in­tend to win that race be­fore we re­lease the soft­ware.

Was Windows Easier than ma­cOS?

Yup! And by a long-shot, too.

As I said be­fore: Microsoft is ex­tra­or­di­nar­ily more ac­com­mo­dat­ing to de­vel­op­ers than Apple is. I have had a lot of beef with Apple over the years due to their hos­tile at­ti­tude to­wards the peo­ple who make soft­ware for their plat­form.

The Windows APIs we needed to in­ter­act with were:

1. Faster than the equiv­a­lents on ma­cOS.
2. Better doc­u­mented.
3. Simpler.

Something about the win32 API makes me think that Microsoft has their head screwed on right. It’s al­ways nice to see my sus­pi­cions con­firmed.

What Is Next?

I will be work­ing to re­fine the set­tings UI to bet­ter rep­re­sent the Windows’ setup process (spoiler alert: it’s a lot sim­pler). Plus, I think I will be back­port­ing the same com­po­nents we use for the Desktop set­tings menu to the Chrome Extension.

If you want to keep track of my progress, you can fol­low this PR Stack in GitHub.