Delta/Desktop still does not have a download for Windows, though some progress for building deltachat-core has been made.
Does anyone know if there could be a VM image that one could download for use with VirtualBox or so for Windows? It could just contain a standard mini linux install and the delta chat app, probably installed from the flatpak or so.
It’s otherwise a bid sad that windows users cannot make use of the already quite nice delta/desktop.
I didn’t tried myself, but I can’t see some reason why it should fail:
https://visualgdb.com/tutorials/android/virtualbox/
I was more thinking about the Delta Chat Desktop app, not the android one 
this is possible, at least for some people to play a bit with Delta Chat, but with people already complaining about Electron is slow, Electron + in a VM + in Windows isn’t something a lot of people will be eager to use for a long time, I guess…
I guess using Arch could be a good idea – packaging works there IIRC.
The problem is, that you both need to update the OS and delta chat inside the image all the time and a user upgraded needs to login again and re-import his crypto keys.
Or you need to update the OS and delta inside the VM.
In that case the easiest route is just to install some OS in a virtual box yourself (Ubuntu is a good beginner’s choice) and then install delta chat there.
Delta Chat Desktop app is a webapp itself. What’s about adapt it to run on top of a webserver and use the web browser instead?
Movim do that though they provide movim client with the server in a same repository and then, they provide an electron desktop app only with the client but it’s the same code with a few changes to run it inside electron.
Other better example is Wire webapp.
see:
@adbenitez Spike has their own server behind that, that does everything, that isn’t an good option for us because that would mean more centralization.
The webserver would run on linux and in the cloud?
Great
You could use any webserver that support that code. You also could run it on localhost only.
Running a “local webserver+browser frontend” is what the “electron” desktop builds do, more or less.
Take in account that people already have a Web Browser installed that should support all that. Install electron it would be generate redundancy.
In addition, many people, concretely, whom are using a unix-like OS, already have a local webserver installed because it’s needed for others applications, etc and the most of the cases support all that code, I even could say all modern web servers would support that.
And, if it’s not the case, there is many mini webservers it would be used instead all Electron framework. We also could provide a default conf for a webserver in a webapp repository, we could choose one for this purpose.
On the other hand, I think It would be easier to port it to windows in this way
If I remember a better case is Syncthing. It runs on localhost and you must use the browser to connect to it.
The problem is that the backend (deltachat core) doesn’t run on windows yet, the electron frontend works perfectly fine.
So if one would do a webversion there are three possibilities in my opinion:
Maybe the last one it would be easier ¿?
I made an unofficial Virtual Box image for running deltachat in Virtual Box:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmPr3dnkdrtC7zJ6U8nFWPFBZVDGmdGF21shKPEjy3U3fx
(might not be fully downloadable yet, I still don’t quite understand how I get it to be availible when my ipfs node is offline)
or dropbox if ipfs doesn’t work: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mr7xi2iz9pwj8o8/AADPB77_GaiSPi3GWV_-YIj-a?dl=0
No guarantees that it works, but feel free to try it and DM me to tell me your results.
actually I was thinking of a simple webapp without server side interaction, the server just provide the webapp for you to load it in the browser but once it is loaded it can be used as an offline webapp(it doesn’t connect with the server any longer) and this webapp is simple, doesn’t store everything in a local db(don’t use dc core) instead just use the email server as db(just load the messages from the server as needed) and shows the messages grouped by people and dc-groups, and sends messages compatible with dc.
This will mean more work because we can’t reuse core, but it doesn’t need to be too complex, maybe just grab a webmail and making its UI look as DC is enough