Strange. Why didn't they talk about Toga?

[TheJeffah]

https://www.pythonguis.com/faq/which-python-gui-library/

[Jzhenli]

If you want to develop cross platform python GUI, suggest to use toga webview + fastapi+ vue/react.

[freakboy3742]

There's no need to get defensive or to harass people for their opinions because they don't agree with yours - that's not the sort of community we're building with BeeWare. Toga's capabilities can speak for themselves. And, ultimately, the approach being suggested here is a Toga-based approach - just a different one to "vanilla" Toga.

[TheJeffah]

Was I rude? I'm really sorry. I just thought the forum was exclusively for Toga. I didn't think it was open to other discussions. I'm sorry. If my words were harsh, it was never my intention. I simply didn't understand that the forum was open to a variety of topics. I'm sorry @Jzhenli, @freakboy3742. 🙏 Really sorry.

[Jzhenli]

@TheJeffah Hi, I'm here because I like the cross-platform feature of Toga and it almost supports webview on all platforms. We can develop Python GUI applications and run them everywhere. Maybe you prefer native development, but I prefer the hybrid development based on webview. All these are thanks to the Toga project.

[TheJeffah]

I apologize if I was rude earlier, @Jzhenli . I misunderstood the purpose of the forum and thought it was exclusively for Toga discussions. Don't feel excluded by my misguided attitude. After all, we're all welcome. The moderator, @freakboy3742 , is right. I'm also really enjoying Toga. I'm still in the early stages. And I'm actually more inclined towards native features. I think it saves processing and reduces layers. In fact, that is the main reason I am here. 🙏 Thanks again and please accept my apologies.

[Jzhenli]

@TheJeffah Don't worry about it! It's great to hear all sorts of viewpoints; that's how we unlock new potential.

[freakboy3742]

I have no idea why Toga didn't make their list. I've submitted a "bug/feature request" on the FAQ to find out why Toga hasn't ended up on their radar.

[HalfWhitt]

Have you heard anything back, by any chance?

[freakboy3742]

Haven't heard a thing. 🤷

[newbery]

Heads up. It seems Toga is now on their list.

[HalfWhitt]

It also says:

Qt Widgets-based applications use platform native widgets to ensure they look and feel at home on Windows, macOS and Qt-based Linux desktops.

Which seems misleading. As I understand it, it does use stateless native system calls to render what a given widget in a given state should look like, and then uses that to paint to its own buffer. So its OS-theming isn't entirely a custom-built sticker put over the UI. But it certainly doesn't (by default) create and manage OS-level widgets, and doesn't get any of their behaviors for free without re-implementing them in its own process.

[johnzhou721]

I agree. The modal dialogue just feels off... this is Anki made with PyQt. Not blaming the devs of that software, but I think this is just a general limitation of Qt's approach...

[johnzhou721]

It seems like the general trend is that Kivy is talked about more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMFKqcYQQFk came up on my YouTube today, and it didn't mention Toga either. It mentioned PyQt and Kivy, and they even mentioned native experience as one of the things that companies don't like about Python, but Toga actually provides a completely native experience across platforms.

[HalfWhitt]

I know Toga's not at a 1.0 release yet, but even still, I'm surprised by how little known it is, considering both how well put-together it is (not bragging, it was great before I got here) and also how unique it is in its goals and approach. I suspect there's more we could be doing to get the word out, but I'm not really sure what.

[johnzhou721]

Update: I tried posting a comment describing BeeWare, however it keeps getting deleted for some reason. I post it, press refresh, it's there, wait a few minutes and it's gone.

A cursory search of forums such as Reddit gives me the impression that the main reason for not recommending BeeWare is (in)stability, so I think contributing more widget impl's to make more platforms feature-complete is probably a good option, in addition to resolving as many bugs as we can. macOS is already done in that regard, and GTK3 is getting close, so if we keep finalizing more features and adding more patches to this project, in my own opinion it'll get more popular over time, especially after the mobile packaging stuff get done, after which (according to the roadmaps) we'd be able to refocus on Toga and make it a more viable option. [all of this is just my opinion, no offence to those who make BeeWare a well-put-together product]

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Edit

FWIW: BeeWare is almost at the bottom of the first page when I first searched using python to write mobile apps using a guest profile, excluding AI results; subsequent trails with opening new guest profiles and searching again shows that BeeWare is only really talked about in the small gray text and not the title. Results vary, sometimes with BeeWare-related stuff on the first half, but mots of the time it's in the middle to not appearing at all in 2 trails (excluding AI). In conclusion, Kivy almost always gets mentioned bee-fore BeeWare.

Another trend is that people tend to say "Kivy and BeeWare" instead of "BeeWare and Kivy"; "BeeWare and Kivy" (including the quotes) brings up 10 pages of results, while "Kivy and BeeWare" (again including quotes) brings up 22 pages of results.d

I'm not sure what could be done about this, besides advertising and/or proving we're actually a better project. The latter is getting there, though.

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Edit 2: "BeeWare vs Kivy" is 2 pages, while the reverse is 10 pages. All done in quotation marks using a fresh guest profile. On the other hand, changing vs to or we get 2 (BeeWare first) vs 16.

[HalfWhitt]

Well, fair enough. "Keep making it better" is what we're already working on, so I guess we'll just keep doing that 👍