The coolest thing about electron is that it blurs the line between "Node" and "Browser." Here is a Node.js module that typically doesn't work in the browser, but runs as expected in Electron:

var natural = require('natural')
console.log(natural.LevenshteinDistance('one', 'one'))

Example output:

It also means that, during development, we can have the full range of Chrome DevTools at our fingertips: debugging, profiling, Network requests, etc.

Maybe this concept could eventually grow into a larger platform like Cinder or Plask. It could be used to build various rich media experiences (art installations, prints, games, etc) that seamlessly integrate libraries like three.js (browser) and node-opencv (node).

A quick proof of concept shows this isn't too far off. The demo reads an image from disk using fs, processes it using WebGL shaders, and saves the new HTML canvas to a file. It's in "interactive" or development mode (using hihat), so that reloading the source will re-run the program. But the end product would just run once, eg:

shaderize ./original.png --frag ./grayscale.glsl --out foo-gray.png

Other tools could leverage SVG rendering, Speech recognition/synthesization, WebAudio, Canvas2D, GamePad APIs, DeviceMotion, WebRTC, video playback/processing, etc. Or, Electron-specific APIs like taking a screenshot of the page (could be useful for testing purposes).

Some areas that still need to be figured out:

• most use cases of Chrome/Electron are focused on larger GUI apps like Atom, Slack, etc that stay open until the user closes them, and ask for input via GUI (like an Open Dialog)
  • getting Chrome/Electron to run "headlessly" is a bit clunky
• using browserify or webpack rather than Electron's standard node integration is desirable to take advantage of transforms and loaders
  • these bundlers will not resolve require('fs') correctly
  • window.require('fs') still works, but this is not good since Node.js modules will not work correctly
  • it can lead to some surprises since both Browserify and Electron are doing some magical things to make your Node.js code work
• how to pass user options/flags to the Electron instance?
• having a better process shim:
  • process.argv, process.cwd() should work correctly
• should the bundler respect the browser field or not?
• is it possible to handle process.stdin and process.stdout for things like piping images around?
• will this ever work on a server?