shelf

Shelf 🗄️

⬇ Download: macOS Apple Silicon / Intel (4.5 MB) — prebuilt, signed & notarized; open and drag to Applications.

An app store for this repo, built like a piece of furniture: a frameless window of wood (sunny pine in light mode, moody walnut in dark — CSS gradients for the planks, an feTurbulence SVG for the grain, engraved lettering, hand-drawn traffic-light dots on a data-tiny-drag strip). Every example is sorted onto labelled shelves — daily drivers, UX experiments, desktop toys, API showcases — with one-click install, open, update, and uninstall. Plain JavaScript, zero dependencies.

Two tabs: All is the browsing list; Installed is just your icons standing on wooden shelves — click to launch, drag to rearrange (the order sticks), hover for the ✕, an ↑ badge when an update is waiting.

Click a row and it unfolds: screenshot, the full pitch, a link to the app's README. The install button downloads the app's signed & notarized dmg straight from this repo's _builds/, mounts it, copies the .app into /Applications, and unmounts — the same drag-to-Applications you'd do by hand, minus the hand. The ✕ quits the app and uninstalls it, with an optional checkbox to delete its settings folder too. If an installed copy is older than the catalog's version, the button becomes Update. (Shelf itself stays out of its own catalog — the store doesn't stock itself; instead it updates itself through tinyjs' native auto-updater.)

And it stays honest without polling you can feel: a kernel watcher on /Applications (tjs.watch) re-scans the moment anything appears or disappears — drag an app to the Trash yourself and its row flips back to Install in under a second. The catalog re-fetches every 15 minutes (or right now, via the ⟳ in the header), and when an installed app has a newer release, Shelf posts a desktop notification and the footer counts the updates waiting.

How it works:

1. The catalog is catalog.json at the repo root, generated by gen-catalog.js from every app's tinyjs.json + the root README, and fetched live from GitHub after launch and every 15 min — so a fresh release or a brand-new app shows up in Shelf (and triggers the update notification) without shipping a new Shelf. A bundled copy paints the first frame and is the offline fallback (the header says which one you're looking at).
2. Install is fetch (streamed, with a real progress bar over content-length) → hdiutil attach → ditto → hdiutil detach, all from the backend via tjs.spawn.
3. Safety rails — before touching anything in /Applications, Shelf reads the target's Info.plist and only proceeds if the CFBundleIdentifier is the expected art.tarwin.* id. A Boo.app that isn't our Boo.app gets a "name taken" badge and is left alone. Download URLs are pinned to this repo, and Shelf refuses to uninstall itself.
4. Installed detection is plutil -extract over each app's Info.plist (tinyjs stamps CFBundleVersion), plus a pgrep for the running dot next to the name.
5. Self-update rides tinyjs' built-in updater, not the catalog: tinyjs.json carries an update.url pointing at _builds/shelf/manifest.json, which the runtime checks in the background ("auto": "daily") and Shelf re-checks on ⟳ and at launch. When a newer release is out, an amber Update & relaunch banner drops under the tabs; clicking it verifies the download's sha256 and code signature, swaps the .app in place, and relaunches.

tinyjs dev      # run with hot reload
tinyjs build    # package dist/Shelf.app — a 4 MB app store
tinyjs publish  # + shelf-<ver>.zip & manifest.json → copy into _builds/shelf/