Can you help us build a native desktop Ghost app?

Since Ghost started, we’ve always been very passionate about dedicating all of our time and efforts to building for the web. In the last couple of years, though, we’ve watched as the technology available for creating native desktop apps with web-views have evolved from primitive, to really-quite-impressive.

Towards the end of last year, we were very fortunate to have Enric from Todoist get in touch and offer to help Ghost out with some OS X development.

Having seen how well both Slack and Atom have done in the last few years, we were really excited by the possibility of creating a slick desktop experience to complement our existing web based app.

So we said “hell yes” to Enric, gave him a private repository to play with on Github, and within a week or two he’d thrown together a prototype implementation which had multiple Ghost blogs running in a single OS X application. Rejoice!

It was immediately striking how much more attention the app commanded psychologically by being both in the dock menu, and visibly separated from the browser.

Unfortunately, since the holiday season Enric has (understandably!) become very busy with Todoist again, and has much less time available to play with this. But, we loved where it was going and wondered how we could keep the project alive.

So, we thought: Let’s open up the repository, and see if anyone else is interested in working on this. This is where you come in!

Right now, what we have is a very simple, alpha prototype - but we’re really interested in the possibility of building out a full Electron application to provide native application wrappers for Mac, Windows and Linux. Much like Atom has done.

But we need help.

If this sounds like something that you have some experience with and would be excited to work on, please get in touch via the comments below. We’d love to chat!