gaybro8777 / messenger-web

The official web app for Pulse SMS - built on Vue.js.

Pulse SMS - Vue.js Web App

The Pulse community is pretty great. This web app started out as a third party, alternative client, to the official Pulse SMS web app. It is built on Vue.js. Big thanks to Solomon Rubin for creating an awesome base.

This version of the web app will be taking over as the official version, in the coming weeks/months. As an open-source client, anyone is free to contribute and help improve the Pulse experience. This web app has improved performance/load times, a cleaner architecture, and new features. It will be much easier to work with and improve, than the legacy web app.

Before you will be able to use this, you should create a Pulse account from the Android app. To use this web app, you have two options:

• Visit the hosted version of this web app, by opening https://pulsesms.app
• Build and run the web app locally, or deploy it to your own hosting location, using the build steps below.

Build Setup

Getting up and running is very easy. You will need npm installed:

// install the dependencies
npm install

// start the server at localhost:8081
npm start

The npm start command should automatically open your web browser to a local version of the app. The local version of the web app will still use the same backend endpoints as the hosted version, so no additional configuration is required.

If you want to build the app for a production environment, that you could deploy:

# build for production with minification
npm run build

# build for production and view the bundle analyzer report
npm run build --report

Contributing

Please fork this repository and contribute back using pull requests. Features can be requested using issues on the Pulse SMS issue tracker/roadmap, rather than on the issues for this repo. I know there are some issues on this repo, right now. They will be migrated (or finished), as the app moves in to the production state.

Any code, comments, and critiques are appreciated.

Pulse Experiments

From an end-user perspective, I am not a big fan of just filling out the settings menu. Little "tweak" preferences that the majority of users will not find helpful, probably will not be added to the app. Making new preferences means a much higher overhead for new users, and a more complicated experience for current users. Many users will not understand "one-off" preferences and they will just confuse them, which is a bad user experience.

However, as an open source app, I want developers to be able to customize their experince, the way they want. I have made a /experiments page that can hold any number of settings and preferences that other people want to add into the app and maintain. If you have a suggestion for the web app, feel free to implement it there, create a PR, then we can test it and roll it out to everyone if it will be useful for the majority of people.

This /experiments page will never be advertised to end-users. No one should assume that the preferences there will work or request support on them. This page is simply for developers to test new ideas/concepts that they would like to see in the app. It could also be a good place to A/B test new changes.