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Chrome apps: serial to display platform agnostic

Lucandentella describes a Chrome App that displays serial port information.

During the development of my electronic projects, I sometimes need to develop a graphical user interface (GUI) that talks using serial communication with the devices I create.

In the past, I usually chose to develop those interfaces in C# and using the .Net Framework; framework which allows a rapid development, offers great ways to customize the interface (for example the ability to use custom fonts as in the GUI for RTCSetup) and makes easy to access all the different graphical elements of the operating system

Today I’m going to describe you a way to develop cross-platform applications with the same techniques you use to develop web sites and without requiring external libraries: the Chrome Apps.

In this tutorial I described how you can, using the Chrome Apps, easily develop real cross-platform applications. In this way, you can add a rich user interface to your electronic projects and it will run on Windows, Linux or MacOS (and with an experimental library also on Android and MacOS).

When investigating Kodi on the Raspberry Pi run on LibreELEC, I found that there is app for that, of course. But Kodi also supports control via a web interface. That means I could either install an app on my Android tablet or I could just run the browser to tell Kodi what I wanted it to do. Why install yet another app when I could do the same thing with an app that is already there?

Java was thinking about it but HTML 5 and the other modern web technologies are making a lot of progress towards the standard UI. Lucandentella’s example shows the possibilities.