terra-pictura

A cross-platform desktop application that maintains your wallpaper as a "live", customisable representation of the Earth.

Technologies

This project is essentially a Polymer Web app, packaged into a desktop application with Electron.
It uses WebGL for the 3D rendering.
The Earth's texture files (including the clouds layer) were provided by the NASA.

Development setup

Simply install the node and bower dependencies using:

npm install && bower install

Development run

For development, this application can be run as either a Web or an Electron app.

As an Electron app

Run this project as an Electron app with gulp start.
To enable live-reload, use gulp dev start.

As a Web app

To run this project as a Web app, you'll need to have the Polymer CLI installed globally.

Run it with polymer serve. The app will be served over http on your local machine on the port 8081.
Use polymer serve --open to have your default Web browser automatically connect to it when it's ready.

Note: When running as a Web app, all the system-dependent functions will be mocked.

Production build

Web only

To only build the embedded Web app:

gulp package:web

This will create a build/default directory containing an bundled Polymer app run through HTML, CSS, and JS optimizers.

Note: When running as a Web app, all the system-dependent functions will be mocked.

All platforms

To package the app with Electron:

gulp package:all

This will:

• run the package:web task that rebuilds the application from scratch
• package Electron apps for all platforms and architectures under build/packaged

Specific platform

To only package for a specific platform, additional tasks are provided.
For example, you can package the app for both architectures (ia32 and x64) of the win32 platform using:

gulp package:win32