Harmonic Part 2 - Adding global keyboard shortcuts to an Electron Web App

This post is the second in a series of how to use Electron (formerly atom-shell) to turn a Web Application into a Desktop Application. For this tutorial, We’ll be working on a cross-platform desktop client for Google Play Music. This second post will focus on adding global shortcut keys for controlling the application. It builds on the code from the first post. You can download the code from GitHub.

Harmonic Part 1 - Turning a Web App into a Desktop App with Electron

This post is a first in a series of how to use Electron (formerly atom-shell) to turn a Web Application into a Desktop Application. For this tutorial, We’ll be working on a cross-platform desktop client for Google Play Music. This first post will focus on setting up your application, and loading the webpage into the window.

As someone who switched over from Spotify, the only annoyance I’ve had with Google Play Music is the lack of a desktop client. There are already clients out there for Linux and OSX, both of which I use, but nothing for when I’m on my Windows PC.

That’s where Harmonic comes in.

Harmonic is pretty simple really. It loads in the Google Play Music webpage into a window on your desktop, and then registers global keyboard shortcuts to let you control playback without having to focus the window. If you want to skip the tutorial and just look at the code, you can check it out on GitHub.