Build and ship native GUI apps on Python with Beeware [audio] | Hacker News Reader

Build and ship native GUI apps on Python with Beeware [audio]

talkpython.fm

84 pointsmikeckennedy6 comments

This is worth a listen simply for the brilliant ways he figured out how to convert python to native function calls for both ios and android.

Listening to the author, Russell Keith-Magee, gives me the feeling that he might just be able to pull this off. Partly for his experience on the Django core dev team and partly because he just seems like a really smart guy while at the same time having the ability to rally community engagement.

https://github.com/pybee/toga

Sounds like a great proposition, but a cursory search on Google found no specifics, and I am not going to listen to hour and a half (!) of talk just to get the feeling of the state of things.

So, does anyone know if this is feasible, or should I stick to Android + iOS native for now?

The project is still in the development stages. More info here: http://pybee.org/ -- with this page being useful for starting off: http://pybee.org/project/using/

I don't think there is a "Status" tracker of sorts -- but a lot of the projects are still beta, but starting to be used in a few production apps.

I've listened to the podcast before, it's mostly about the projects in this github organization: https://github.com/pybee/

One of these projects is the "toga" toolkit, which maps to native toolkits on the platforms it runs on. On iOS, this is done through the FFI (because objective-c uses the same calling convention as C, apparently), on Android it's done by compiling the Python bytecode to JVM bytecode, and calling native Java-level methods on the existing GUI toolkit. (That's what the "voc" project does).

I haven't tried it. To me, it all sounds promising, but some of it might be in early-ish stage.

really interested in checking this out. I keep trying to pick up Kivy, but I have found the documentation(kivy) is really hard to understand.

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