storj-walk

README

Totally 90's Style | Storj Browser

In a world where Windows 95 rules over the PC desktop land, one man will travel through time... to bring back distributed object storage.

What?!

Storj's distributed object storage platform is written in Go. Unfortunately, a lot of Go programs are either cryptic command-line tools or web applications that require complex web-application stacks. Significant community efforts have gone into bringing Storj to various programming languages, often for some end-user facing functionality.

So why not write simple native-desktop applications in Go? One issue is the lack of a clear winning technology. A myriad of options exist, but which one to use? Gio is interesting, but lacks that native desktop feel. Qt is a solid choice, with some potential licensing questions.

At the end of the day, you get started with something. Walk ("Windows Application Library Kit") is a Windows only wrapper for the Win32 GUI Common Controls. These controls date back to 1995, and should inspire a visual nostalgia for anyone who predates Google Docs. While Android greatly dominates multi-platform OS statistics, Windows still holds a ~75% market share for desktops. In many cases, prototyping or releasing via Windows-only applications is the easiest approach, rather than building anything too complex.

Features

• multi-bucket file browsing of the Storj Network
• file metadata caching via LevelDB for a responsive GUI
• icons! without them, the GUI looks sad
• uses Storj Link Sharing + WebView to preview some content types

Unimplemented

• data virtualization: EG: sorting, filtering, paging at the cache layer rather than in the GUI
• file upload / download
• icon caching (I'm not sure if this has value?)
• refreshing the cache
• changing credentials (just delete the database for now)
• a modern WebView... this features is based off of IE version ancient and doesn't really work