Ninja Hub Desktop

A highly optimized, fullscreen kiosk desktop application exclusively for Ninja Hub.

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🚀 Overview

Ninja Hub Desktop is a lightning-fast, secure, and fully customized desktop client designed to wrap the Ninja Hub portal. Built using Electron, this application strips away standard web browser clutter, preventing navigation outside of the approved ecosystem and delivering a true native desktop experience for students and staff.

✨ Features

• 🖥️ True Fullscreen Experience: Borderless, immersive fullscreen window optimized for kiosks and lab environments.
• 🎨 Fluid Page Animations: Automatically injects native-feeling "Fade & Scale" animations via the Web Animations API on every page load to eliminate harsh white flashes and clunky web transitions.
• 🔒 Secure Navigation: No URL bar, no arbitrary popups. External links are intercepted and kept safely within the window.
• 🧰 Hidden Control Toolbar: Move your mouse to the top edge of the screen to reveal a dynamic, blurred drop-down toolbar featuring:
  • 🏠 Home: Instantly returns to the Ninja Hub dashboard without dropping your active session.
  • ⟳ Log Out: Instantly clears the local cache, active cookies, and session data, securely returning the user to the login screen.
  • ✕ Close App: Gracefully terminates the application.
• 🧠 Context-Aware Controls: The toolbar intelligently monitors authentication states—automatically hiding the Home and Log Out buttons while the user is on login screens to prevent navigation confusion.
• 🌍 Cross-Platform Native Integration: Deeply integrated into the host OS, rendering the official Code Ninjas logo natively into Windows taskbars, Linux app trays, and the macOS Dock.

📦 Releases & Architecture

This application is built natively for Windows, Linux, and macOS utilizing electron-builder for minimal payload sizes, broad deployment flexibility, and absolute kiosk environment lockdown.

Check the GitHub Releases tab for pre-compiled binaries:

• Windows: .exe (NSIS Installer) and Portable .exe (x64)
• Linux: .AppImage (Universal executable), .deb, and .tar.gz (x64)
• macOS: .dmg Installer (supporting both Intel x64 and Apple Silicon arm64)

🔑 Microsoft Azure Intune & Conditional Access Bypass

On macOS, strict Azure/Intune MDM and Conditional Access policies often block custom Electron web wrappers because of mismatched OS reporting or custom agent signatures. This release implements custom User-Agent spoofing that mirrors standard macOS Google Chrome. By aligning browser OS headers with Apple device profiles and completely stripping all "Electron" markers from requests, single sign-on (SSO) login screens pass authentication checks without MDM blockages.

🛠️ Development & Building

To compile the application yourself, ensure you have Node.js (v18+) installed, then run the following commands:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/codeninjasfl/Ninja-Hub-Desktop.git

# Navigate into the directory
cd Ninja-Hub-Desktop

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start the application in development mode
npm start

# Compile for a specific platform
npm run build:win      # Compile Windows x64 NSIS/Portable
npm run build:linux    # Compile Linux x64 deb/AppImage/tar.gz
npm run build:mac      # Compile macOS DMG (Universal x64/arm64)

# Compile for all platforms at once
npm run build

🚀 Release v2.1.0 Updates & Features

The v2.1.0 release brings discrete multi-tab support for Academies and Impact, session persistence, automatic process cleanup for updates, and developer debugging tools:

🗂️ Discrete Multi-Tab Management (Academies & Impact)

• Discrete Chrome Tabs: Clean, dark-themed tabs for managing multiple activities and past projects simultaneously.
• Seamless Viewport Aspect Ratio Shift: Translates the page layout down by 32px when tabs are active, keeping all web page controls and headers fully accessible without scaling distortion or black borders.
• Automatic 1-Tab Lockdown: The tab bar automatically hides completely (display: none) when only a single tab is open, giving students 100% of the screen.
• Session & Auth Duplication: Opening a new tab on Impact or Academies automatically clones sessionStorage and localStorage tokens, maintaining active Azure B2C login states across tabs without re-logging in.
• External Activity Tab Opening: External activity links (MakeCode, Scratch, Codio, etc.) automatically open as separate tab windows.
• Zero-Refresh Tab Closing: Closing a tab seamlessly closes the window and updates remaining tabs without reloading the app or restarting mainWindow.

🔄 Pre-Login Autoupdate & Process Cleanup

• Early Update Alerts: Update checks run prior to user authentication.
• Conflicting Process Termination: Automatically terminates competing background instances during updates to ensure 100% update completion.

🚀 Release v2.0.0 & v2.0.1 Updates & Features

The v2.0 releases bring major platform updates, startup flow optimizations, and extended platform compatibility:

🚀 Launch Onboarding (v2.0.0)

• Startup Onboarding: Re-routed the first-launch Sensei onboarding tutorial to render immediately on startup using a local offline-safe onboarding.html rather than waiting for remote portal login pages to load.
• Auto-Redirect: Once onboarding is skipped or completed, the application writes a persistence status file and automatically transitions the window to the main Ninja Hub login portal.
• Kiosk Close Options: Added a Close App button directly onto the onboarding modal, enabling kiosk exit support on first-launch.

🔒 Clean Task Manager Process Exits (v2.0.0)

• Force Exit Implementation: Replaced all instances of app.quit() with app.exit(0) across key events (like the Ctrl+J shortcut, the toolbar's Close App drawer button, onboarding's Close button, and the autoupdater process spawn). This force-kills all active GPU processes, Chromium helper threads, and renderer nodes, preventing lingering zombie processes in Task Manager.

🍎 Full macOS MDM Conditional Access Support (v2.0.1)

• Intune Bypass: Added runtime session headers that override default User-Agent strings on macOS, masquerading the browser context as standard macOS Chrome and eliminating "Electron" string flags.
• Universal dmg Build: Re-added macOS target configurations to support native universal compilation on Apple Silicon and Intel hardware.
• OS Lifecycle Handlers: Restored macOS-specific menu and Dock activate listeners.

🚀 Release v1.2.0 Updates & Features

The v1.2.0 release brings layout refinements, navigation optimizations, and features for Code Ninjas Senseis:

🛠️ GameBuilding Session Integration

• Contextual Sliding Tab: A hidden drawer (🛠️ GameBuilding Session) is located at the top-right of the window. Hovering your mouse in the top-right corner reveals the tab. Clicking it redirects directly to the GameBuilding session form (https://forms.codeninjas.com/gamebuilding).
• Conditional Visibility: The tab is context-aware; it only displays on the main Ninja Hub login screen and is automatically hidden when navigating elsewhere (e.g. the student dashboard).

⚡ Performance & Layout Refinements

• Isolated Viewport Triggers: The top hover boundary is split into two regions (width: calc(100% - 220px) on the left for the main app navigation drawer, and width: 220px on the right for the GameBuilding session drawer). This prevents both drawers from triggering simultaneously and eliminates overlapping hover listeners.
• Hardware & External Site Compatibility: Retained permissive permission handlers, certificate validation bypasses, and standard browser CORS flags. This ensures external educational platforms (e.g., Codio, Scratch Link, and other resources nested within Academies) and local robotics/hardware kits connect and load assets without issues.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Editor Auto-Refresh Loop Fixed: Resolved a bug where background window/iframe requests (e.g., MakeCode Arcade simulators) were hijacked by the main window, causing the editor to auto-refresh every 10 seconds. Hijacking is now strictly restricted to Code Ninjas portal domains.

📄 License & Attribution

This project was built to interface with Ninja Hub. All associated branding, logos (mainlogo.png), and trademarks belong to Code Ninjas.

Created and maintained by Brennan Shea (Code Ninjas FL).