Fix startup crash on non macOS platforms.

[MitchTalmadge]

On Windows and other platforms, there is no dock. This checks for the darwin platform on startup and does not utilize the dock if we are not on macOS. Things are still wonky on Windows but I was able to use the app a little bit.

[brandly]

thanks Mitch!

i've never given Windows any love, but i'm glad to hear it's doing something worthwhile. what else is wonky? i'd enjoy seeing some screenshots. think maybe this comment is mentioning what you've handled here. with your solution, maybe the app doesn't get an icon?

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i'll dump out some thoughts, in case you're interested. this project shows its age in certain places. in development, babel is handled by this require preceding the require for the React app:

Lax/src/index.html

Lines 16 to 17 in 9ba3535

	require('@babel/register')
	require('./js/main')

for production, babel is used in a more typical manner, and that first require is stripped from the html.

other things are nice tho. a GitHub workflow runs to build the macOS app when a release tag is created. the dev environment is generally nice, with React/Redux dev tools, but styles currently feel kind of out of the loop with the Sass dependency.

I bet there's an Electron project with the nice dev environment, but also with a better production build process and builds for other platforms created with GitHub workflow(s). if you know of another project that achieves all this or you have thoughts on the matter, i'm all ears!!

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i'm happy to merge this as it is now, but let me know what you think of the icon. thanks again

[MitchTalmadge]

Hey @brandly!

You are right, there was no icon on Windows. Didn't notice that. All fixed now.

I also added cross-env which was suggested by someone else too, because on Windows you can't simply prefix commands with NODE_ENV=production. It causes an error. cross-env allows all platforms to set environment variables properly. (I suppose this now fixes #72 except for the build issue, but since there's no Windows builds at all, we can tackle that in a separate issue.)

To follow up on your other comments, I will try to make some issues for the Windows problems I find so that we can tackle them one at a time :) The app does work and I can connect to servers and chat, just some glitches once in a while. Very cool to see that GitHub actions can run on macOS! That's so convenient. I will see what I can do about improving the build process here to work for Windows as well. So low on free time though :P Aren't we all?

Btw I really resonate with your comment in that issue:

I think a lot of IRC folks consider electron to be bloated and unnecessary, but most IRC clients aren’t very welcoming!! Just wanted to make something friendly.

I feel the exact same way. Every IRC client I've seen is so godawful ugly except this one. I think the typical IRC user is so afraid of using Electron that they force themselves to use inferior and uglier interfaces. I'm not for it. We can build something much better that average people who don't normally use IRC would actually consider using. The ugliness and non-intuitiveness of most IRC apps is a huge reason it is going out of fashion.

[brandly]

great! i just ran this on my end, and everything still works fine.

So low on free time though :P Aren't we all?

yeahhh i'll work on this repo in short bursts, and then ignore it for months at a time.

Every IRC client I've seen is so godawful ugly except this one.

thank you! a lot of nerd culture is pretty exclusionary, which is fine i guess, but then it shouldn't be a surprise when Slack IPOs.

i downloaded a few irc clients years ago and didn't like any of them, so i made this repo. i haven't spent time in other clients, so they might have great features i haven't considered. but all the traffic to this repo seems to come from google searches, so i guess it's filling some kind of void.

thanks again for spending your time on this