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Comment by jwrallie | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing. I'm a big fan of Anki, but mostly I am using it for language learning these days.

Sometimes I branch into other uses. I was quite successful using Anki when studying for my amateur license exam.

I will consider using Ankify if I need to study from notes at some point in the future.

What I loved about your post is how you evolved with Ankify as you developed it, I think this is a great example for people starting on their own journeys of learning how to program, I always felt that having a project in mind from the beginning is the best way to keep moving forward, and your journey is a great example of that.

I am considering using Python for cross platform gui design. Could you expand on why you chose electron over other alternatives, for example Qt?

Also, could you share which resources you used to learn about gui development on Python?

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Definitely, thank you. Ankify really was present in every step of me learning programming.

I think I just got caught at a bad time with Python. It was a few years ago, and Python was in the process of going from 2 to 3. Consequently, a lot of the things I tried ended up throwing error messages.

I tried few of Python's GUI makers but found that I end up having to learn so many new things that only apply to that one GUI program. Where as with Electron, I'm really using HTML/CSS/tailwind that I use every where else. I could essentially make Ankify web only and it would make minimal difference to the UI.

I was fond of PyAutoGUI. It seemed very intuitive for me at the time.

You could look into Python Eel. It's pretty useful to create a quick web based desktop GUI with Python. I'm currently working on a project with it that uses React for the GUI.

I also created a somewhat similar tool [1] for quickly making Anki cards when reading foreign language texts. It's not electron, but rather PyQt, so it conforms to your system theme if you are on Linux.

However, it comes with a number of downsides:

- Distributing the app is a pain and breaks every now and then when you add a dependency that may not behave correctly or require additional hacks with your packaging tool of choice (in my case, cx_freeze).

- The interface is without a doubt less customizable compared to using a Web-based framework. However, I like this because I believe the user should be able to decide what the app should look like based on their system Qt themes. I also simply don't enjoy front-end work too much.

[1] https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve

Another thing that made me end up choosing Javascript is because I could define an user interface and then use it over and over.

For this project, I first defined how each component would look, then used the same UI for both the website and the app to have a coherent look: https://kangruixiang.github.io/snow-ui/

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