PySimpleGUI wrapper for Pythonista...?

Niall

Hi,

I teach programming and I'm now using PySimpleGUI in my courses. The university only officially supports CPython on desktop and Anaconda/Jupyter; however, I'd be happy for students to use an iPad if they've got one (and a keyboard) but only if they can use the right libraries!!

If you're not familiar with PySimpleGUI, it's a fairly basic but robust cross-platform standard that is implemented as a wrapper for all the main Python GUI libraries -- TkInter, Qt, WxWidgets, Remi (web browser as GUI). You'll clearly get different visual results on each, but the functionality will be almost identical on each.

To me, a Pythonista wrapper (PySimpleGUIPythonista or similar) would make perfect sense, as it would give us a way of making cross-platform GUIs on our iPads and would mean a lot more Python apps would work on Pythonista.

Niall

(Did have a wee nosey at Toga, as I see Pyto does that, but it's more complicated than I want for a course where GUI dev is a side-effect of the content, not the main goal. Also, there seem to be serious dependency problems installing Toga on Windows when it comes to Python versions, and that's a hell of lot of discouraging boilerplate for absolute newbies...)

mehmetsal

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mikael

While it would be an intriguing and feasible project to wrap the Pythonista UI components in PySimpleGUI, it would still not be trivial, and I am afraid the results might not meet the needs of most user groups.

For students, taking a course exercise and trying to run it on Pythonista could very easily fail due to unsupported syntax, given that Pythonista runs the now-unsupported Python 3.6.

For Pythonista users, given that a lot of the power of Pythonista is in its access to iPhone-native functionality, it is very unlikely that an existing significant piece of code would run anywhere else.

Thinking of your requirements, if PySimpleGUI really runs reliably on the web, the students with iPads could maybe use repl.it to run the code, sync code with GitHub, and do the editing on Pythonista.

You probably already have all the materials built around PySimpleGUI. Otherwise I would suggest you to take a look at flet, which has the benefit of running a native or web Flutter app without additional platform-specific wrappers.

Niall

Well, I'm teaching an introductory course and need to teach a "lowest common denominator" version that will work for various different courses with different needs.
Between the various IDEs and Python installs, the lowest I've found is WinPython 3.7, and the only potentially significant difference between that and 3.6 for a beginner's level course is the ordering of dictionary keys.

"For Pythonista users, given that a lot of the power of Pythonista is in its access to iPhone-native functionality, it is very unlikely that an existing significant piece of code would run anywhere else."
The reason I never became a heavy Pythonista user myself was the lack of portability. I would have done a lot more dev work on the iPad if I wasn't damning myself to forking stuff.

Niall

(I love the idea of sitting on a beach coding, but even if it had the battery life for it, my laptop's staying off the beach. I've still go a first-gen iPad mini, which I consider practically disposable at this point!!!)

Ryan_Bray

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Niall

Just curious as to whether anyone has looked at this at all? I'm kind of contemplating seeing if I can get a minimal version of this going to let my students use Pythonista next year....

upwart

It would indeed be nice, if we had PySimpleGUI basic functionality (what is that?) in Pythonista. But, that would be quite a job, although not impossible.
BTW, Although PySimpleGUI claims to be cross-GUI, in fact it only runs properly under tkinter. So, if we would have tkinter at our disposal under Pythonista, we could run PySimpleGUI as well. But, it's quite unlikely that we will ever see tkinter running under Pythonista or on an iPad in general (unless we get full Linux one day). Just dreaming ....

Niall

@upwart Well I do kind of think they've potentially overcomplicated PySimpleGUI and I personally try not to use the full functionality. I think I tended to test by switching between the basic library (TkInter) and the other major ones (Qt, Wx, Web) to make sure I was using the most interoperable version. I found the Qt tended to be best anyway, and the very basic idea of having the interface defined as a list of rows where each row is a list of columns gets rid of a lot of need for thinking... as long as you don't need a "table" type view.

My thinking is that in my own masters, I could have benefited from a GUI that was easy to write but hard to make "nice and shiny", cos I would be able to put up with a scrappy-looking interface that matched my thinking, but couldn't see the point in learning fiddly GUI libraries to get the same result. I reckon a lot of my postgrads would fall into the same bracket.

JonB

@Niall ok, I haven't tried yet, but I can't think of a reason why the web version wouldn't work on pythonista. You'd need to launch a webView for display, but it looks like remi is pure python, and pysimpleguiweb ought to work.

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Niall

OK, finally got round to working out how to install additional packages (lack of pip solved by installing StaSh)>

Unfortunately the syntax of PySimpleGUIWeb doesn't seem to agree with Pythonista. There are a couple of lines in PySimpleGUIWeb.py saying "if image_size is not (null, null)" that raise a warning "SyntaxWarning: "is not" with a literal, Did you mean "!="?"

I can completely see the logic of that, as I realise the common error of mixing up == with is... all I'm confused about is whether this was something that the PySimpleGUI guys did with a Python 2 target in mind, cos I know that Python 3 cleared up is/is not handling quite a bit.

But that's a warning... the real error that stops it is a popup window overlay
"
Attribute error
'HTMLParser' object has no attribute 'unescape'
"

(I'm basically only commenting to document my thinking. Will genuinely consider making a very basic copy of the main GUI functionality now from Pythonista UI stuff.)

JonB

@Niall that is just a warning. See https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI/issues/3663
Don't know why they never fixed that, but probably doesn't affect things. .. it should probably be something like

if (image_size[0] is not None) or (image_size[1] is not None)

But I'm not sure. Since they never bothered fixing it, I'm guessing it isn't causing issues.

JonB

can you post the full traceback?

JonB

@Niall looks like they haven't upgraded to python 3.9 yet.

Replace the falls to unescape from HTMLParser objects with

import html
html.unescape

See the workaround near bottom of this
https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI/issues/4119

You have to edit gui.py in your remi folder (site-packages/remi), and make the suggested changes.

ReneeColangelo

@Niall I have tried those ones, and it feels good. hehe