D3Designs comes to the desktop, in public beta for Mac and Windows

The D3Designs desktop app is available today as a public beta, on Mac and Windows.

You can download it at app.d3designs.io/download. Both platforms ship together, at feature parity with each other, sitting alongside the web app rather than replacing it. The web version is going nowhere. The desktop version is for the people who would rather not run their session inside a browser.

Why a desktop app

There are three real reasons.

The first is the session view itself. Running a four-hour D&D session inside a browser tab means sharing window real estate with whatever else you have open: Discord, the rules wiki, the playlist, the eight other tabs that crept in over the week. The desktop app gives the session its own window. When you are running a game, the game is what is on screen. Nothing else is fighting for the same pixels.

The second is staying connected when you are not actively looking. The desktop app runs in the background and keeps its connection to the realtime layer alive even when minimized. If your party messages the campaign mid-week, the app knows. If a session goes live and you have not joined yet, the app knows. The browser version cannot reliably do this because browsers will quietly suspend tabs they think you are not using. The desktop app does not have that problem.

The third is the menu bar on Mac and the tray on Windows. Quick access to the things you reach for most, without needing to find the right window or tab first. A click to jump to your active campaign. A click to start a session. The kind of small convenience that a desktop product gets and a web product cannot.

What it does not do yet

No offline mode. The desktop app needs a connection to work, the same way the web app does. Offline access to campaigns, drafts, and the editor is something I want to build, and it is not in this beta.

Other gaps will surface as people use it. That is the point of a public beta.

Built on Electron, with the predictable pain

The desktop app is an Electron build. That gets us a single codebase, two platforms, and most of the existing web app's behavior without rewriting it. It is the right answer for a solo team that wants desktop reach without committing to two separate native codebases.

The interesting work was not the app itself. It was the build pipeline. Code signing for Mac, code signing for Windows, getting both platforms building reliably on CI, and getting the certificates and entitlements right on both sides. None of that is novel work. All of it is the kind of work that eats a week if you have not done it before, and there is no clever way to skip it.

If you ship a desktop app, plan for the signing story before you plan for the features. The features are the easier half.

What you get with the beta

A dedicated app window for sessions. Background presence on the realtime layer so the platform can reach you between sessions. Menu bar and tray integration. The same campaign manager, character generator, monster generator, NPC generator, and live session view as the web app, in a window that does not share its space with anything else.

It is a beta because the things that break in production almost always look different from the things that break in development, and a desktop app has a wider surface area for those differences than a web app does. Auto-update, error reporting, performance under real conditions, the long tail of OS-specific quirks. All of that is what a public beta gets to find out.

Download it, give it a try

app.d3designs.io/download for Mac and Windows.

Run a session on it. Run a couple of sessions on it. Leave feedback like always, in Discord or the in-app feedback flow. The desktop app is the same product as the web app, in the shape some of you have been asking for, finally here.