Native application

[vjeux]

Would be great to wrap excalidraw within electron (or equivalent) and publish it as a native application to the various app stores.

[voluntadpear]

What about making it a PWA instead? Android currently supports adding them to the Play Store as Trusted Web Activities and hopefully iOS will do the same soon.

On Desktop, Chrome lets you download a desktop shortcut to a PWA.

[vjeux]

We should do both :)

[lipis]

https://excalidraw.com/?id=5742560236535808 :D

[bringking]

I am now obsessed with using this for all my diagram needs at work. I have a little experience with it. Would love to help this effort. Are you thinking this code would be co-located in this repo? Or in another one?

[lipis]

I think it would be more sane to have it in a different repo.

[bringking]

@lipis yeah, the tradeoff being some work would need to take place to make the core sharable between the Native and Web app?

[lipis]

https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw-desktop

[voluntadpear]

I can work on make the regular Web version a PWA if you'd agree it'll be useful. cc @vjeux

[vjeux]

Yeah, that would be great @voluntadpear !

[nrgapple]

A local electron build would be great for all working in a secure environment where reaching out to an external server is not possible for sensitive information

[dwelle]

@nrgapple all data sent to our server is encrypted on client so our server cannot read it even if it wanted to.

You can check the source code:

excalidraw/src/scene/data.ts

Lines 145 to 175 in d39c7d4

	export async function exportToBackend(
	elements: readonly ExcalidrawElement[],
	appState: AppState,
	) {
	const json = serializeAsJSON(elements, appState);
	const encoded = new TextEncoder().encode(json);
	const key = await window.crypto.subtle.generateKey(
	{
	name: "AES-GCM",
	length: 128,
	},
	true, // extractable
	["encrypt", "decrypt"],
	);
	// The iv is set to 0. We are never going to reuse the same key so we don't
	// need to have an iv. (I hope that's correct...)
	const iv = new Uint8Array(12);
	// We use symmetric encryption. AES-GCM is the recommended algorithm and
	// includes checks that the ciphertext has not been modified by an attacker.
	const encrypted = await window.crypto.subtle.encrypt(
	{
	name: "AES-GCM",
	iv: iv,
	},
	key,
	encoded,
	);
	// We use jwk encoding to be able to extract just the base64 encoded key.
	// We will hardcode the rest of the attributes when importing back the key.
	const exportedKey = await window.crypto.subtle.exportKey("jwk", key);