feat: Introduce aw-tauri as a lightweight, cross-platform alternative to ActivityWatch

Author: 0xbrayo

_posts/2024-05-5-introducing-tauri.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Tauri the future of ActivityWatch
+date: 2024-5-5 16:35 +0300
+author: "Brian Vuku"
+author_twitter: "subrupt"
+---
+
+We're excited to introduce a new project [aw-tauri](http://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-tauri). Aw-Tauri is a lighter, faster cross-platform repackaging of ActivityWatch. As the name implies the project is built with [Tauri](https://Tauri.app), a relatively new toolkit that offers all the benefits of electron with none of the downsides!
+
+## Why Tauri
+
+Tauri apps are lightweight, memory efficient and secure by design. Tauri does not ship a renderer but uses the platform native renderer via webviews. This simple design choice makes the app size compact and memory efficient during runtime, as compared to electron apps. Tauri apps are secure, only interacting with the host systems through tauri apis. This protects the host computer from arbitary code execution (at least in theory).
+
+## Developer Experience
+
+Aw-tauri is built with the [rust server](https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-server-rust) serving the backend and a UI written in Vue. It takes almost no time to get upto speed with the project!
+
+Cross platform development before tauri was a hassle. Binaries had to be built and tested for each target platform separately. Tauri greatly simplifies this.
+
+Tauri enables us to generate releases from the same codebase through a CI/CD pipeline. It handles everything platform specific, on linux you get a lightweight ```.appimage```, on windows a ```.msi``` installer and ```.app``` on macos. It just works!
+
+## User Experience
+
+Aw-Tauri aims to consolidate most of the functionality that is offered by additional code by other repos. It integrates the window and afk watchers natively. It offers support of notifications by default via [aw-notify](https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-notify). It houses its own webview, no need to visit ```http:localhost:5600``` anymore. Watchers can be started and stopped right from the trayicon. Updates can be pushed seemlessly across platforms provided by tauri's update system!
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Aw-Tauri is still in active development and contributions are welcome and encouraged. More eyes on the code will be beneficial to the project. We are excited to see where this project goes and how it will shape the future of ActivityWatch.