Show HN: Datasette Desktop, macOS App for SQLite and CSVs

This is a desktop application wrapper around my Datasette web application. I built the desktop app because the alternative was talking my users through setting up a Python 3 environment on their computers, which was too much friction!

The most interesting aspect of this application in my opinion is that it supports plugin installation, which can be used to add all sorts of additional functionality - see the full list of plugins at https://datasette.io/plugins

Getting plugin installation working was not easy at all: I ended up bundling an entire copy of Python 3.9 inside the /Application/Datasette.app bundle in order to support this - I wrote more about how that works here: https://simonwillison.net/2021/Sep/8/datasette-desktop/#how-...

I launched the 0.2.0 version of the app yesterday - I wrote up some detailed annotated release notes about what's new in that release (plus animated GIF demos) here: https://simonwillison.net/2021/Sep/13/datasette-desktop-2/

(The entire app is open source, code is at https://github.com/simonw/datasette-app)

Simon is modest…there are many points that are really interesting.