Simon Willison’s Weblog

Russell Keith-Magee: Build a cross-platform app with BeeWare. The session videos from PyCon US 2024 have started showing up on YouTube. So far just for the tutorials, which gave me a chance to catch up on the BeeWare project with this tutorial run by Russell Keith-Magee.

Here are the accompanying slides (PDF), or you can work through the official tutorial in the BeeWare documentation.

The tutorial did a great job of clarifying the difference between Briefcase and Toga, the two key components of the BeeWare ecosystem - each of which can be used independently of the other.

Briefcase solves packaging and installation: it allows a Python project to be packaged as a native application across macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and various flavours of Linux.

Toga is a toolkit for building cross-platform GUI applications in Python. A UI built using Toga will render with native widgets across all of those supported platforms, and experimental new modes also allow Toga apps to run as SPA web applications and as Rich-powered terminal tools (via toga-textual).

Russell is excellent at both designing and presenting tutorial-style workshops, and I made a bunch of mental notes on the structure of this one which I hope to apply to my own in the future.