.Net 6 WPF app using msft webView2 to host web apps like WhatsApp, Gmail, Google Voice, etc so I can fine tune my preferred desktop UX.
there's a few "good citizen" user experiences i'm looking for that don't come with the corresponding apps or web pages out of the box:
- ESC to minimize
- Standard window close button overridden to minimize
- no tray icon - shifting away from Notification Tray icons to having everything on Taskbar (Windows 11 influence)
- message count indicator on Taskbar icon
- there are no binary releases published here yet... you'll have to build the exe yourself... let me know if there's interest and i'll take the time to create the CI/CD github action script
- once you have the exe, the idea is to create shortcuts to it with following command line parameters in sequential order (see .lnk examples in this repo):
---------- first two parms are required ------
- the starting url (e.g. https://gmail.com)
- appname (e.g. Gmail) - this correlates to:
- the main window title
- pulling appname.ico for the running taskbar icon
- loading appname.js as custom script that executes inside of every web page loaded by the initial url. one primary usage pattern is scraping the web pages for message counts (which get displayed as the Windows Taskbar icon's "badge"). but this also faciliates all kinds of "Greasemonkey" hacking, like changing or eliminating page content (see vipleague.js for examples, although now parm #5, blocking scripts, has eliminated the need for me in this case)
---------- the rest are optional ------ - True/False - [Default: False] True = separate folder for application storage, cookies, etc.
- True/False - [Default: False] True = block all external link nav (good for disabling sites that are riddled with click jacking)
- "filename1.js,filename2.js" - comma delimited list of strings which are the only script resources allowed to be loaded (fyi, implemented as wildcard match via string.Contains)
- x:y - forced window aspect ratio. decimals allowed (e.g. 16:9.5 somehow worked best for a video site)
example command line:
path\GenericWebAppWpfWrapper.exe https://vipleague.im/american-football-schedule-streaming-links "VipLeague" False True "embed2.min.js" 16:9.5
lastly, set the "Start in:" of the shortcut to the directory those ico and js files are in
- since this does a window minimize on close button, there's an additional button in the title bar to truly quit the app
- in the js scripts, i'm using straightforward document.querySelector patterns to scrape the unread message count for each site and send that out through the embedded browser's messaging api into a wpf event handler that renders the count as a standard "badge" on the Windows Taskbar icon ... pretty neat integration!