Teleport is an app for quickly sending files on the local network.

Sadly, sharing files between two computers in the same room is still an unsolved problem in 2017. Of course there's USB keys, shared network folders, cloud storage services, and messaging apps, but they all have severe drawbacks in terms of speed, privacy, or user experience. The Apple ecosystem has AirDrop to cover this use case, but there is nothing comparable to it on GNU/Linux.

That's what Teleport is trying to fix: It offers a dead-simple interface for what should be a dead-simple task: Open the app on both machines, choose a file, the receiver gets a notification, the file is sent.

Unlike many FOSS apps, Teleport is design-driven. A designer was involved from the very beginning, and the entire app is built around providing a great end-user experience.

Teleport is a fully native GTK+3 app written in C, and integrates seamlessly with the GNOME desktop. Thanks to Flatpak, you can already use it on most GNU/Linux distributions [1].

I'll talk about my journey building this app (my first GTK app) from scratch, my collaboration with Tobias Bernard, the designer on the project, and my experience with the documentation and developer tools for the GNOME platform.

[1] http://frac-tion.com/teleport-flatpak