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I Developed a Desktop Client For CoinMarketCap

by Paul Razvan BergDecember 31st, 2017

Too Long; Didn't Read

Many cryptocurrency traders and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2b8t78/whats_hodl/" target="_blank">hodlers</a> check out the prices regularly because they know a day in this Wild West means a full month in the traditional investment space.

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featured image - I Developed a Desktop Client For CoinMarketCap

Snapshot from website

Story

Many cryptocurrency traders and hodlers check out the prices regularly because they know a day in this Wild West means a full month in the traditional investment space.

I personally fell in love with the tech behind cryptocurrencies when I read the whitepapers a couple of months ago. I invested in what I considered it had intrinsic value and, naturally, now I want to keep track of my money. CoinMarketCap is a great tool for that, but there’s a problem.

Being a developer who also suffers of tabmania on Chrome, it’s almost impossible to properly keep in touch with my cryptos. Just take a look. It takes ages to look for the right tab.

This is a decent number of tabs, usually there are many more

That’s why I decided to kick off a simple but working desktop client for CoinMarketCap, as on a few searches on Google I only found poor, undocumented attempts.

Incentive

Simple enough, at the core of the app there is a webview which wraps the official website. At the moment, there are 4 advantages of using the desktop version:

Running in its own window, it won’t get mixed up with your normal browsing
Has its own special icon in the dock/ task bar/ alt+tab list/ cmd+tab list/ start menu
You can set it to launch on startup
When you have to quit the web browser because something made it go nuts and it started to use 1,000% CPU and 10 GB RAM, the client will continue to run (and the same goes for your ordinary browsing if it’s the client that’s causing the problem)

Also, there are automatic updates, which is really important due to the fact there are some really cool features coming soon.

Roadmap 🚀

Refresh button
Automatic refresh
Ability to set notifications when a specific price is hit
Develop the same app for other coin tracking websites, such as CoinGecko

Contribute

The source code is, of course, open source and anyone can contribute. As I will be constrained by time, I encourage you to try and play with the project.

PaulRBerg/CoinMarketCap-Desktop_CoinMarketCap-Desktop — A simple desktop wrapper for CoinMarketCap_github.com

Build instructions are in the bottom of the README file. For feature requests and bug reports please submit an issue or get in touch with me on Gitter or Twitter @PaulRBerg.