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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

OS X is surprising to me. This is something that should be cross platform.

I'm Dash's developer. Currently there is Zeal, that has access to all of Dash's docsets - http://zealdocs.org. Native apps for iOS and Windows are also under development and recently an app for Android has been released (http://lovelydocs.io/). Note: these apps are made by other developers, I'm just providing the docsets.

Zeal AND lovelydocs will help me tremendously. Thanks for that, and I'll be waiting for dash on new platforms too.

Zeal looks nice... but am I missing something or are there no urls available for just the docsets on the dash/zealdocs pages? I get that zealdocs can download dash docsets -- but quickly skimming the c++ source for editdocsets didn't reveal any obvious link to a http repo?

> Native apps for iOS and Windows are also under development

Oh, that's nice! I've had Dash for a couple of years now and love it, but it would be very nice to have it open on my iPad while I develop on my mac! Awesome!

looking fwd to the Windows version (& hopefully Visual Studio integration?)!

I agree. I'm mainly using Linux so I've started working on a Linux version (also targetting Windows). If you like it you can use Zeal[0], which is free -- works on Linux/Windows. There's a signup page for my app[1] if you want to get notified of the launch/beta.

[0] http://zealdocs.org/ [1] http://dash-port.launchrock.com/

Can I request you use Qt? Thanks

I was considering Qt but decided to use Kivy[0]. Why do you think I should use Qt?

[0] - http://kivy.org

I've never heard of Kivy before, but judging purely from the gallery on that page, my first impression is that I see no screenshots of any native-looking desktop apps. Unless that's just an omission in the gallery, that would be a good reason to use Qt.

It's true that Kivy's widgets are not native and Qt's are. Would that be a sufficient reason for you to not use the app?

Here is my reason for Qt. Qt won the Linux tool kit wars (My opinion) and it is used by so many projects that it keeps the ecosystem more standardized. Plus when I am at work on my one Windows box I like seeing Qt on there also.

Ok, I'll look into Qt licensing wrt commercial Python apps and will consider using Qt if there are no issues.

There's LGPL PySide (http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide) which should be suitable for commercial projects under LGPL, but PySide is Qt4 only. There is also PyQt (http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/license) with Qt5 support, but its free license is GPL-only, so if you're not doing open source, it's not going to work, unless you buy their commercial license.

BTW, Zeal's original author here - thanks for mentioning Zeal and good luck with your project!

As some personal advice, I wouldn't try Kivy for such content-oriented desktop app. I've tried briefly using it once for doing a very simple application, but it seemed much harder to implement usual desktop-like widgets. Overall it looks like it's good for graphics-rich and custom-rendered applications.

You'll also need some HTML rendering engine for docsets. While there are Kivy projects like https://github.com/kivy-garden/garden.cefpython or https://github.com/kivy/kivy-berkelium aiming to provide exactly that, they don't seem very mature.

However, I don't claim to be Kivy expert at all, and maybe you'll have good experience with it.

Thanks for the info and advice. Much appreciated!

Have happily paid for the desktop version, I'd love to pay again (seriously) for an iOS version!

Same here. I'd love to use it if it worked on Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is my main development platform. To be honest I've had some doubts about targeting Linux for my app because I don't know how many devs are using Linux as their OS for development, but I hope I'm not wasting my time.

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