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docs: new blog post "Introduce aw-tauri" #34

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29 changes: 29 additions & 0 deletions _posts/2024-05-5-introducing-tauri.md
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---
layout: post
title: Tauri the future of ActivityWatch
date: 2024-5-5 16:35 +0300
author: "Brian Vuku"
author_twitter: "subrupt"
---

We're excited to introduce a new project [aw-tauri](http://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-tauri). Aw-Tauri is a lighter, faster cross-platform repackaging of ActivityWatch. As the name implies the project is built with [Tauri](https://Tauri.app), a relatively new toolkit that offers all the benefits of electron with none of the downsides!
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## Why Tauri

Tauri apps are lightweight, memory efficient and secure by design. Tauri does not ship a renderer but uses the platform native renderer via webviews. This simple design choice makes the app size compact and memory efficient during runtime, as compared to electron apps. Tauri apps are secure, only interacting with the host systems through tauri apis. This protects the host computer from arbitary code execution (at least in theory).
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Tauri apps are secure, only interacting with the host systems through tauri apis. This protects the host computer from arbitary code execution (at least in theory).

While this is true if you build an app the "tauri way", we are running a HTTP server, so we still need to take precautions to not expose sensitive information to other network devices and websites.


## Developer Experience

Aw-tauri is built with the [rust server](https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-server-rust) serving the backend and a UI written in Vue. It takes almost no time to get upto speed with the project!
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Cross platform development before tauri was a hassle. Binaries had to be built and tested for each target platform separately. Tauri greatly simplifies this.
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I'd like to expand on this, going into our long history of struggling with PyInstaller etc.
(I can write it, just leaving the comment here)

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Yeah, you could write that bit... I'll add you as a co-author in the credits. I also considered showing the makefiles for before and after. Just how much easier it is to set up with Tauri. Might make the post too long Idk.

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Yeah, I don't see a ton of value in going into the details and quoting code, but we could drop some links to source files.


Tauri enables us to generate releases from the same codebase through a CI/CD pipeline. It handles everything platform specific, on linux you get a lightweight ```.appimage```, on windows a ```.msi``` installer and ```.app``` on macos. It just works!
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## User Experience

Aw-Tauri aims to consolidate most of the functionality that is offered by additional code by other repos. It integrates the window and afk watchers natively. It offers support of notifications by default via [aw-notify](https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-notify). It houses its own webview, no need to visit ```http:localhost:5600``` anymore. Watchers can be started and stopped right from the trayicon. Updates can be pushed seemlessly across platforms provided by tauri's update system!
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## Conclusion

Aw-Tauri is still in active development and contributions are welcome and encouraged. More eyes on the code will be beneficial to the project. We are excited to see where this project goes and how it will shape the future of ActivityWatch.
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