Appium has recently released a new open source GUI app for Mac/Windows/Ubuntu users. It's an app with a new UI and doesn't require node or NPM to be installed. It's built using electron (for more information visit: https://electron.atom.io/) and comes bundled with node runtime. It can be downloaded and installed from the specified location (for more information visit: https://github.com/appium/appium-desktop/releases/tag/v1.0.0). Based on your machine OS, you can choose to download the respective installer file and install the Appium app. The latest released version is 1.6.4.

Here's how the new Appium app looks when you launch it after install:

At the first glance, it allows you to do the following:

• Start a simple server (version 1.6.4) with the default configuration
• Explore some additional settings under the Advanced tab, and then start the server or save it as presets

Let's take a detailed look at starting a simple server.