Show HN: My attempt to demystify Python GUI development
github.com
github.com
A few days ago, I showcased Dresscode [1]: dress up your code with a beautiful GUI. Dresscode is a shortcut for creating a GUI, you don't even have to know how to use the GUI toolkit under the hood.
I think it is worth writing a tutorial for GUI dev while continuing to promote Dresscode [2]. It is also a pleasure to try to grab the reader's attention and keep it until the end of the tutorial.
If you are not into GUI development, let us know [3] if you were (partially) convinced by this short tutorial.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26731674
1. Indeed, Tkinter GUIs don't have to be ugly. Thonny is an example of a nice-looking Tkinter app.
2. Merely painting your GUI black doesn't magically make it beautiful. Just slightly prettier but also harder to use. Proper composition (layout) plays a much more important part in aesthetics.
A few months ago, Hubstore [1] was not compatible with existing Python distribution packages. Today, Pyrustic Manager produces Wheels, Hubstore consumes Wheels and therefore is de facto compatible with many existing applications.
Feedback helps me improve the project. So, I'm glad to read your review !
I just discovered Thonny, I'm going to take a look at it.
Regarding the black color, personally that doesn't make it harder to use [2]. This is a dark theme that I named Cyberpunk Theme. The goal is not to show that black makes a GUI looks beautiful, but to promote the theme/style mechanism I designed to custom the look. I promote a separation between the theme/style and the layout of widgets a bit like HTML/CSS but without creating a another yet DSL. The theme was actually incorporated into the Pyrustic codebase. I removed it weeks ago. Now it is a distribution package available on PyPI. So tomorrow, someone can if they want to do a light theme that they'll call Sunny or Snowflake.
I intend to make a website to show a summary of all the Pyrustic sub-projects, because for the moment you have to read a lot of lines before understanding the project. Also, GUI/aesthetics is only part of the project. For example there is pyrustic.threadom, a library to perform GUI-Toolkit-compatible multithreading easily.
Thanks again for the feedback !
I definitely need to quickly build a website to summarize the project's ecosystem. The documentation was more messy months ago. I discovered a framework for writing better documentation [1] which made things less messy.
> We certainly need a practical way to make Python desktop GUI apps
You can take a look at Dresscode [2]. This is my latest project [3]. It aims to quickly create a desktop application without prior knowledge of Tkinter. Also, it's suitable to existing codebases (no need to alter your existing codebase). If Pyrustic Framework is C, Dresscode would be Python !
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26002656