8 items tagged “electron”
2024
pywebview 5 (via) pywebview is a library for building desktop (and now Android) applications using Python, based on the idea of displaying windows that use the system default browser to display an interface to the user—styled such that the fact they run on HTML, CSS and JavaScript is mostly hidden from the end-user.
It’s a bit like a much simpler version of Electron. Unlike Electron it doesn’t bundle a full browser engine (Electron bundles Chromium), which reduces the size of the dependency a lot but does mean that cross-browser differences (quite rare these days) do come back into play.
I tried out their getting started example and it’s very pleasant to use—import webview, create a window and then start the application loop running to display it.
You can register JavaScript functions that call back to Python, and you can execute JavaScript in a window from your Python code.
2021
Datasette Desktop 0.2.0: The annotated release notes
Datasette Desktop is a new macOS desktop application version of Datasette, an “open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data” built on top of SQLite. I released the first version last week—I’ve just released version 0.2.0 (and a 0.2.1 bug fix) with a whole bunch of critical improvements.
[... 2,208 words]Datasette Desktop—a macOS desktop application for Datasette
I just released version 0.1.0 of the new Datasette macOS desktop application, the first version that end-users can easily install. I would very much appreciate your help testing it out!
[... 1,761 words]Datasette Desktop 0.1.0 (via) This is the first installable version of the new Datasette Desktop macOS application I’ve been building. Please try it out and leave feedback on Twitter or on the GitHub Discussions thread linked from the release notes.
Building a desktop application for Datasette (and weeknotes)
This week I started experimenting with a desktop application version of Datasette—with the goal of providing people who aren’t comfortable with the command-line the ability to get Datasette up and running on their own personal computers.
[... 1,423 words]2019
When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop. Slack appear to have pulled off the almost impossible: finishing a complete, incremental rewrite of their core product. They moved from jQuery to React over the course of two years, constantly shipping new features as they went along. The biggest gain was in rewriting their code to support multiple workspaces, which means desktop client users no longer have to run a separate copy of Electron for every workspace they are signed into.
Monaco Editor. VS Code is MIT licensed and built on top of Electron. I thought “huh, I wonder if I could run the editor component embedded in a web app”—and it turns out Microsoft have already extracted out the code editor component into an open source JavaScript package called Monaco. Looks very slick, though sadly it’s not supported in mobile browsers.
2017
gillyb/sensitive: A native desktop version of the kibana sense plugin. I love using the Sense UI for developing against Elasticsearch, but it’s infuriatingly hard to obtain these days. You can install it as a Kibana plugin but I work with multiple Elasticsearch instances and I don’t want to have to get it installed on all of them. Until recently I was using a Chrome extension for it, but that’s now been disabled as containing malware and removed from the Chrome extension store. I’ve now switched to Sensitive, which packages Sense up as a native OS X application using Electron.