GSoC 2024: Seamless Updates for Joplin Desktop Application

GSoC 2024 has now come to an end, and we're thrilled to announce the successful completion of four incredible projects! We extend our heartfelt thanks to our talented contributors—HaHaBill, wh201906, Benjiman, and AliceHincu—for their hard work and outstanding achievements.

We also want to express our gratitude to the mentors—Daeraxa, Tessus, Roman, JackGruber, and Eduardo—for their invaluable support and guidance throughout the program.

Over the next few days, we'll be sharing a series of posts diving into the details of each project. Today, we look at Alice's work on the Joplin update manager!


Seamless Updates for Joplin Desktop Application

Contributor: @Alice37

This summer, I got the opportunity to contribute to Joplin as part of the Google Summer of Code 2024 program, which proved to be an incredible opportunity for me to grow and learn.

I submitted project proposals for two ideas, and I was picked to integrate auto-updates, which were previously a concern for Joplin because they disturbed users' experiences.

With guidance from my mentors, we developed a service that checks for auto-updates every 12 hours but also enables users to manually initiate these checks. Previously, updates required users to navigate to a webpage containing the necessary files to be downloaded to obtain the updated version of the program - an inconvenient and time-consuming process. Now, the user may update the app with a single click and can choose between updating to the newest release or prerelease. This feature is currently accessible only for Windows and MacOS.

This service is now in its last phases of development, after which it will go through rigorous testing.

I want to express my gratitude to my mentors for supporting me along the way by providing me with ideas on how to approach specific challenges when creating this service and to the community for occasionally giving me a helping hand.

I wholeheartedly suggest the 2025 program for Joplin to anyone who has read this far and is considering participating.

17 Likes

Amazing!!

Great Can‘t wait to see the rollout!