IPFS Desktop's README says:

(Windows) Right-click a file/folder's icon to add it to IPFS from the pop-up menu
(Mac) Drag and drop a file/folder onto the IPFS logo in your menubar

The Windows approach should also be possible on Linux.

Apparently, this is what does it for Windows: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-desktop/blob/master/assets/build/nsis.nsh

I haven't done further research here just yet. Definitely a stretch goal for the "one week" timeline.

This is a bit trickier than it sounds, because we want to use the link that ipfs prints when it starts. We also want to open the user's choice of browser; check $BROWSER, then xdg-open, then open, then fall back to common browsers like firefox/chromium/chrome.

That is, a use case where someone runs IPFS from a pendrive, without installing it on the system.

Right now we look for ipfs in $PATH. We should also look for it somewhere local; for example, right next to where the go-ipfs-desktop binary is.

The systray UI is nice for showing passive status indicators and actions, but not for showing the user when something goes wrong.

For example, if the IPFS daemon crashes (#3), we want to tell the user. Changing the systray icon to the "off" status is fine, but not particularly visible. We should also show a notification.

We can use https://pkg.go.dev/gioui.org/x/notify for this.

For example, if it crashes or if the user stops it.

The simplest way would be to periodically check that it's still running after we start it.

A better way would be to remain connected to the IPFS daemon in some way (via a socket, or an API endpoint) and then notice when the connection drops because the daemon is killed.

Should we also notice if the ipfs daemon is started by the user? Probably not, because this tool is not aimed at power users who would start the IPFS daemon directly.

@mvdan I'm filling this to track your idea:

A way to do a release that bundles go-ipfs-desktop with go-ipfs itself. This should be possible now that Go 1.16+ supports embedding binary assets, meaning we could have a "full" release binary that embeds a full go-ipfs binary.

We can't really have proper tests, but at least we can check that the code builds on all three major platforms.

So far, I've been testing on Linux and @joeltg has been testing on Mac.

We need a Windows volunteer, ideally one that uses Windows regularly and is technical enough to know how to install Go and run go build.

If we can't find a volunteer, then one of us should set up a Windows VM as a fallback.

If we start the ipfs daemon and it never prints the "ready" line, we hang.

Use a timeout, like five seconds.

There's a very easy way to repro; place an executable shell script called ipfs in the same place where go-ipfs-desktop is run from. The script can just be a sleep 1000.