Learn Electron, Figma and Twit

OpenGraph images are the images you see when you paste a link into a social platform and it "unfurls" into an image, title, and description. This happens on Twitter, Discord, Slack, and many other platforms. This collection goes over everything from designing OpenGraph images in Figma, to implementing them in CodeSandbox, to returning headless browser screenshots from Netlify Functions, and finally using Cloudinary as a write-through cache. 

You will come away from this collection with the ability to ship an API that you can use on any of your sites, and also on-demand, that can generate images for not only OpenGraph unfurls, but also for Instagram, GitHub, and more. Using headless browsers with playwright to generate our images means we get full access to all the responsive power of CSS and all the logical power of JS to handle layout, importing assets like pngs, choosing different fonts, and more.

The image below is generated via the project you'll build and deploy in this course

![An example opengraph image](https://relaxed-payne-d1bfbe.netlify.com/opengraph?title=Building%20an%20OpenGraph%20image%20generation%20API%20with%20Cloudinary%20Netlify%20Functions%20and%20React&tags=figma,netlify%20functions,playwright&author=chrisbiscardi)

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Building an OpenGraph image generation API with Cloudinary, Netlify Functions, and React

Figma is a collaborative prototyping tool that allows you to responsively design your applications, with resolution presets for all of the most popular devices. In this course, we will explore the fundamentals of Figma’s toolset that you can use for various design functions. 

We will start from scratch, then walk through scenarios you may encounter when designing a website or application. We will cover building reusable designs — known as “components” in Figma — all the way up to prototyping your designs to show screen transitions and animations between state. 

By the end of the course, you will understand the basics of Figma so you can use it to your advantage when building your next app or website.

Design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place with Figma.

figma

The Beginner's Guide to Figma

Figma is a powerful design tool built with web technologies. Using the same technologies you can extend it with plugins.
You can use Typescript and/or javascript, you can load your favorite UI frameworks like Vue.js or React.js and build powerful plugins.

Using a plugin you can:

* Load Real Data from your server and visualize it 
* Change elements in your design programmatically 
* Convert your design to JSX or HTML, the sky is the limit

Learning these skills will help you make your design workflow faster by making Figma doing exactly what you want





JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Create a Figma Plugin Using Typescript

Electron is a framework that makes it easy to create cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Electron and open-source tools give you everything you need to create a compelling desktop app--native user interface elements like menus and dialogs, installers, auto-updates, and more. 

This course will teach you the core concepts of Electron so that you can leverage it to create your own desktop application for macOS and Windows. 

We'll go over:
- Creating user interfaces in Electron (both HTML based and native)
- Understanding Electron's multi-process architecture 
- Shipping your app to users

Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

electron

Build a desktop application with Electron

In this course we’ll learn how to create Twitter bots. We’ll first learn how to interface with the Twitter API using Twit.js, which allows us to post statuses, search tweets, and interact with followers. We’ll create several example bots that show the diversity of possibilities, using powerful tools such as RiTa.js, Google’s Cloud Vision API, and Tracery. We’ll learn how to tweet data from Google Spreadsheets, and to compose and tweet a song for an audio bot. We’ll also learn how to host our bot logic on Heroku and Docker. 

Twitter API Client for node

Supports both the REST and Streaming API.

twit

Create your own twitter bots

In this video, you will learn how to bootstrap a Basic Figma plugin using the Figma app

Bootstrap a Figma Plugin

In this video, you will learn how to send and receive data from Figma to use it in your plugin

Communicate between the plugin and Figma 

In this video, you will learn how, in your plugin, to change the text value of a selected text node in Figma 

Change the text value of a select node

Now you have your plugin built and ready it's time to publish it.

In this video, you will learn to publish your Figma plugin to the public

Publish a Figma Plugin

Figma is a web-based collaborative interface design tool that we can use to prototype the look and feel of our OpenGraph cards. We dive into a few of the basic features using [Ryan Warner's](https://twitter.com/ryanwarnercodes) community [social branding templates](https://twitter.com/ryanwarnercodes/status/1239578329340170240), such as text placement, using the eyedropper and color tools, as well as pulling in gradients as images to fit our working area.

* [Social Branding Template](https://www.figma.com/community/file/820337605519256142)
* [Gradient Magic](https://www.gradientmagic.com/)

Designing OpenGraph unfurls in Figma

Figma Auto Layout gives our designs superpowers. By adding auto-layout to our button component, we can change the text within the button while automatically maintaining consistent horizontal and vertical padding, just like we would in code.

Build an Adaptive Button with Figma Auto Layout

Keyboard shortcuts speed up our workflow, and make us aware of some features we didn't know existed. Figma has an awesome in app menu for exploring the keyboard shortcuts available to us.

Figma Keyboard Shortcuts

React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.

react-native

How to create an app icon from scratch, generate the required sizes, and add to your iOS app.

Image editing - [Figma](https://www.figma.com/) is a free online design tool used in the video. You can use any design tool you like, such as Photoshop, Sketch etc, as long as the output is a 1024x1024 .png image.

Asset generator - [Iconizer](https://raphaelhanneken.com/iconizer/) is a free mac app for generating the correct sized assets from your icon.

Design and Add a Custom App Icon with Figma to Your React Native iOS App 

We’ll get a real-time stream of tweets, and learn how to filter a stream by keyword, location, and user.

Use the Twitter Stream API with Twit.js

In this lesson we’ll load javascript into the BrowserWindow and display the Electron version on the page. Loading javascript into Electron is almost exactly the same as loading it into the browser, however it is a best practice to use the `require` syntax.

Load JavaScript in an Electron BrowserWindow

A main menu is a hallmark of native desktop applications. Electron makes it easy to create native menus and menu items in JavaScript.

We’ll go over creating a menu template using `Menu.buildFromTemplate` and then setting it as the main application menu via `Menu.setApplicationMenu`. 

Create a native desktop system menu with the Electron Menu module

In this lesson we'll learn about `dialog.showMessageBox` . This is the most basic Electron dialog but it offers lots of customization options, such as `type`, `icon`, `title`, and `buttons`. Some of these options vary by platform, so we'll also look at how things differ between Windows and Mac. 

Display native desktop dialog windows with Electron

In this video, we'll learn how to save and open a file using native dialogs in Electron. First, we'll use `dialog.showSaveDialog` to display a native save dialog and use `dialog.showErrorBox` to display an error message if the save failed. Then, we'll open the file we saved using `dialog.showOpenDialog`. Finally, we'll look at how these dialogs look on Windows vs Mac.

Save/Open a file with an Electron dialog window

Dealing with multiple processes in an application is new for many JavaScript developers. We’ll go over what exactly a process is and what the primary responsibilities of the main and renderer processes are. The main process is primarily responsible for creating native UI elements and managing the application lifecycle, while the renderer process runs the HTML based UI. Accordingly, different APIs are available in each process. 

Understand Electron’s main and renderer process architecture

In Electron, we often need to coordinate actions between multiple processes. For example, if a user clicks a button in a renderer process that makes a new `browserWindow` open, we need to be able to send a message to the main process that triggers this action. We’ll look at how to do just that using the `ipcRenderer` and `ipcMain` modules.

Communicate between Electron processes using IPC

`remote` allows you to seamlessly interact with main process modules as if they were in the renderer process. It’s a super useful abstraction over IPC. We’ll learn how to use it and how to avoid some potential gotchas it has. 

[Devtron](https://electron.atom.io/devtron/) is a devtools extension that the Electron team has made. We’ll be using it to view all of the IPC that happens in our application. In this lesson we’ll learn how to include and use it in our code. 

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