The Hybrid Windows App

This month, instead of a blog purely about our development updates, we thought it would be interesting to hear some of Dan’s thoughts about interesting new technologies.

Everybody is familiar with both Windows client applications and web applications.  Windows applications are able to access the user’s local computer to tightly integrate with other installed applications such as MS Office or a Document Management System client.  Web applications are server-based which makes it much easier to customize through well-known technologies such as HTML and JavaScript, but is severely restricted for integration with local resources.

SeeUnity has recently had the occasion to write an application that’s a little bit of both. We’ve written an iManage Desktop/FileSite extension that allows a user to select documents and folders directly from within those applications and synchronize them with one or more external systems such as SharePoint or HighQ.  As with any FileSite extension, it has to integrate with the application on the user’s local machine so it can respond to documents being selected, the app’s menu being selected, and so on.  On the other hand, we wanted to provide the same kind of flexibility and customization that we built into Fusion.  HTML templates can be modified to customize the user interface, themes can be dynamically applied to completely change the look and feel without coding, and in certain cases, JavaScript files can be changed to fine tune the integrations behavior.