Show HN: TiddlyInstall – One HTML file that creates desktop installers

Developer Matthew Roberts released TiddlyInstall, an open-source MIT-licensed single-page HTML tool that generates desktop installers for Windows, Linux, and Mac without any software download and works offline. TiddlyInstall uses NSIS for Windows support and shell scripting elsewhere, relying on metadata vouched for by hashes in file names, embedded data, and signatures so new binaries require only browser-side metadata changes. Roberts credited Claude with the implementation and said the project is inspired by TiddlyWiki but not affiliated with it.

Hello HN, I wanted to show you some new software I designed and Claude implemented. It's called TiddlyInstall. TiddlyInstall is a single-page website that lets you easily build installers for all your projects. What makes TiddlyInstall unusual is there is no software to download and everything is able to work offline. Based on the project that it's inspired by: you can download TiddlyInstall as a HTML file and use it to make working binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac. How it works: Most installers / binaries are custom per project. But with very few modifications they can be made general-purpose. Installers can be made to follow meta-data which can be vouched for by hashes in their file names, embedded data, and signatures. That means new binaries only need meta-data to be changed which can be done entirely in the browser. For the installers themselves NSIS was chosen for its amazing Windows support. Otherwise, the rest is shell scripting. I am very excited about it and would love people to try it out. All the code is open source under MIT. Feel free to report issues on the Github at http://github.com/robertsdotpm/tiddlyinstall http://github.com/robertsdotpm/tiddlyinstall Credits: Claude and the authors whose works it was trained on :/ deserve huge credits for the implementation. It would have taken me months to code this all this. This project is not affiliated with TiddlyWiki -- though I am heavily inspired by that project If anyone thinks my work is cool -- I'm currently looking for new opportunities. Feel free to reach out if there's a match matthew@roberts.pm. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841265 Points: 1 Comments: 0