Show HN: Cross-platform desktop applications with PyQT

Yes. So why would I run essentially a second web browser instance to run the same code in a different place?

Beyond that, I had with weird screen refresh issues with the desktop app, where scrolling or even just typing in the text box would cause parts of the main HTML view to just disappear to the point where it'd be unusable. Often images wouldn't load, or would load, but then have the same disappearing issue. Restarting or refreshing the UI wouldn't help. I'd have to restart the app every couple days anyway due to ballooning memory usage. Hell, even the font rendering was weird and didn't match what I'd see by opening a regular Chrome window. I reported the issues to Slack, but never heard back, and after waiting through several releases for a fix, over a period of months, I gave up.

> ... let them use a toolkit that let them easily handle cross platform issues with UI in a sane and repeatable manner.

That's not what I want. I want apps that fit in with my desktop, not apps that look the same across OSes, ignoring platform idioms and style/placement standards.

Here's a small list (which could easily be a much bigger list) of things that are much easier in web dev land than their native counterparts.

- Want to chart some data with nice animations? The chart library in Qt is good... until you need to make it look sexy. If you're in HTML/CSS/JS, you can just reach for an unlimited number of alternative libraries to pull from. (No, saying "go without the animations" isn't an answer.)

- Universal stylesheets are a godsend for quickly iterating on UI. Qt's stylesheets do not come close to the abilities that modern CSS provides you (and frameworks beyond Qt often lack something even close to this). Saying "CSS shouldn't be doing this stuff" isn't an answer, because the alternatives are simply less productive. It's absolutely amazing to be able to target an arbitrary node in a nested structure and tell it to behave differently, and have the entire thing render appropriately.

- You want smooth scrolling (that matches the OS behavior...) at 60fps? There is an untold amount of work that each browser vendor has put in to this effort, and the benefit is greatly undersold. Ever looked into wxWidgets? You have to go out of your way to make a scroll view bounce on macOS. That is utterly insane in 2018 - and no, saying "why does Mac need to be different?" isn't a solution. The entire point of cross platform development is that it should handle this.

- Have you ever tried to optimize scrolling on a TableView in Qt/wxWidgets/Cocoa/etc? Give me HTML/CSS/JS any day of the week.

- This point is slightly separate, but... I've written Python for over 10 years now, and I would not want to write a UI in Python. The language is one of my favorite and works well for most things, but UIs are often just kind of hacky - Python isn't a language that's ideal to write hacky code in. I'd sooner do it in Ruby or something.

Want the tl;dr? There is no other frontend community that even comes close* to the wide range of documentation, available libraries, built-in/free benefits, approachability, and general "it'll just work" feeling across platforms.

I write native UI code daily, and the writing is on the walls for it. Tangentially, this is very much why I suspect Apple is looking to merge Cocoa and UIKit more - it's the only way native Mac apps survive (oh, and even Apple renders significant chunks of some of their apps with Webkit... three finger swipe right on your trackpad if you wanna see some ancient Webkit app history).

* - _maybe_ UIKit for iOS comes close, due to Apple's vendor lock in factor and focus on UI, but that's something that a) rarely extends back to macOS apps and b) usually winds up splintered between Objective-C/Swift implementations.

{ "name": "helloworld", "main": "index.html" }

And index.html is just whatever HTML web page you want, like "Hello WorldHello World". You could also use a javascript file as your "main" file if you want.

Even when you screw up the HTML it will still load, which won't happen if you get your underscores wrong in your example.

Edit: removed erroneous formatting

This is a double-edged sword for multi-platform apps, but isn't a drawback for monoculture environments.

> Can someone please give me some arguments as to why this not only seems like a good idea, but also why it's the best tool for the job?

For a certain class of apps (such as IDEs), its a great idea due to the ease of extensibility as well as making multiplatform releases effortless. I doubt VS Code would have been available for Linux had it used a non-web-tech stack, and it has displaced PyCharm for some of my lighter tasks. PyCharm is written in Java, so it's also not native, but it's the best IDE in the world, IMO.