Making deployment of desktop Python apps trivial: an idea

2010-09-09 13:50

Proprietor and printer in front of Schwartz Print Shop in Minneapolis

Here's what I'm thinking: how hard could it be to make PyQt app deployment absolutely easy? Well, I am guessing: not very hard.

Here's the trick: see what works in the real world, and adopt it.

Question: what has deployed billions of apps and has its users happy? Answer: phones app stores.

Question: how do they work? Answer: well, that's not that short, so let's start explaining.

As I see it, a reasonable app store has the following components:

A Stable Deployment Target

You can't deploy from the store if you don't know what you are deploying into. If the target platform is shaky, you just can't know how to deploy without user assistance, and we are trying to make this easy for the user, which means that's not acceptable.

So, what's a stable deployment target we can provide?

PyQt (so we can deploy GUIs to all major desktop platforms)
Python standard library
Selected modules

What can be (and should be) bundled with the app?

Pure python modules
Artwork and other resources

What may be bundled:

Python modules written in C/C++, but you then have to redo the app for each platform, and that kinda sucks.

Deployment Services

Apps should be able to check if there is a new version of them in the store, to ask for upgrades.
Apps should be added by the deployment platform nicely into the host system's menus, desktop, etc.

Monetization Services

Some way to charge for apps. Even for open source apps, you could ask for U$S0.99 if you install them through the store. Optional, of course, and up to the app owner.
Ad platform? There must be a good one for desktop apps somewhere?

The Store Itself

A website that downloads a "package" associated with a local deployment application.
A app store app. Install things not via web, but via a desktop application.

I don't expect a functional version of this would take me more than a week working fulltime to implement. Of course then there are all sorts of usability, looks, etc. things to consider.

And... I am going to do something I very rarely do. I am going to ask for money.

As an experiment, I have setup a project at http://www.indiegogo.com/Qt-Shop and set a funding goal of U$S 600.

There you can fund me. I promise that if the project is totally funded, I will deliver. If it isn't, I may deliver anyway. I would prefer to have the money though.

The platform would be released under GPLv2 or later.

This is why Qt (and PyQt) are cool

2010-07-24 20:37

Alejandro Dolina once wrote (and this is from memory that's probably 25 years old) of a round table discussing "What's Tango?", and how after two hours of discussing the nature, characteristics and history of tango, one of the members of the panel picked up a bandoneón, played "El apache argentino" stood up and left without saying a word.

So, why are Qt and PyQt cool?

Audio player widget:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import sys, os
from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui, uic
from PyQt4.phonon import Phonon
import icons_rc

class AudioPlayer(QtGui.QWidget):
    def __init__(self, url, parent = None):

        self.url = url

        QtGui.QWidget.__init__(self, parent)
        self.setSizePolicy(QtGui.QSizePolicy.Expanding,
            QtGui.QSizePolicy.Preferred)


        self.player = Phonon.createPlayer(Phonon.MusicCategory,
            Phonon.MediaSource(url))
        self.player.setTickInterval(100)
        self.player.tick.connect(self.tock)

        self.play_pause = QtGui.QPushButton(self)
        self.play_pause.setIcon(QtGui.QIcon(':/icons/player_play.svg'))
        self.play_pause.clicked.connect(self.playClicked)
        self.player.stateChanged.connect(self.stateChanged)

        self.slider = Phonon.SeekSlider(self.player , self)

        self.status = QtGui.QLabel(self)
        self.status.setAlignment(QtCore.Qt.AlignRight |
            QtCore.Qt.AlignVCenter)

        self.download = QtGui.QPushButton("Download", self)
        self.download.clicked.connect(self.fetch)

        layout = QtGui.QHBoxLayout(self)
        layout.addWidget(self.play_pause)
        layout.addWidget(self.slider)
        layout.addWidget(self.status)
        layout.addWidget(self.download)

    def playClicked(self):
        if self.player.state() == Phonon.PlayingState:
            self.player.pause()
        else:
            self.player.play()

    def stateChanged(self, new, old):
        if new == Phonon.PlayingState:
            self.play_pause.setIcon(QtGui.QIcon(':/icons/player_pause.svg'))
        else:
            self.play_pause.setIcon(QtGui.QIcon(':/icons/player_play.svg'))

    def tock(self, time):
        time = time/1000
        h = time/3600
        m = (time-3600*h) / 60
        s = (time-3600*h-m*60)
        self.status.setText('%02d:%02d:%02d'%(h,m,s))

    def fetch(self):
        print 'Should download %s'%self.url

def main():
    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    window=AudioPlayer(sys.argv[1])
    window.show()
    # It's exec_ because exec is a reserved word in Python
    sys.exit(app.exec_())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Video player widget:

import sys, os
from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui, uic
from PyQt4.phonon import Phonon
import icons_rc

class VideoPlayer(QtGui.QWidget):
    def __init__(self, url, parent = None):

        self.url = url

        QtGui.QWidget.__init__(self, parent)
        self.setSizePolicy(QtGui.QSizePolicy.Expanding,
            QtGui.QSizePolicy.Preferred)


        self.player = Phonon.VideoPlayer(Phonon.VideoCategory,self)
        self.player.load(Phonon.MediaSource(self.url))
        self.player.mediaObject().setTickInterval(100)
        self.player.mediaObject().tick.connect(self.tock)

        self.play_pause = QtGui.QPushButton(self)
        self.play_pause.setIcon(QtGui.QIcon(':/icons/player_play.svg'))
        self.play_pause.clicked.connect(self.playClicked)
        self.player.mediaObject().stateChanged.connect(self.stateChanged)

        self.slider = Phonon.SeekSlider(self.player.mediaObject() , self)

        self.status = QtGui.QLabel(self)
        self.status.setAlignment(QtCore.Qt.AlignRight |
            QtCore.Qt.AlignVCenter)

        self.download = QtGui.QPushButton("Download", self)
        self.download.clicked.connect(self.fetch)
        topLayout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout(self)
        topLayout.addWidget(self.player)
        layout = QtGui.QHBoxLayout(self)
        layout.addWidget(self.play_pause)
        layout.addWidget(self.slider)
        layout.addWidget(self.status)
        layout.addWidget(self.download)
        topLayout.addLayout(layout)
        self.setLayout(topLayout)

    def playClicked(self):
        if self.player.mediaObject().state() == Phonon.PlayingState:
            self.player.pause()
        else:
            self.player.play()

    def stateChanged(self, new, old):
        if new == Phonon.PlayingState:
            self.play_pause.setIcon(QtGui.QIcon(':/icons/player_pause.svg'))
        else:
            self.play_pause.setIcon(QtGui.QIcon(':/icons/player_play.svg'))

    def tock(self, time):
        time = time/1000
        h = time/3600
        m = (time-3600*h) / 60
        s = (time-3600*h-m*60)
        self.status.setText('%02d:%02d:%02d'%(h,m,s))

    def fetch(self):
        print 'Should download %s'%self.url

def main():
    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    window=VideoPlayer(sys.argv[1])
    window.show()
    # It's exec_ because exec is a reserved word in Python
    sys.exit(app.exec_())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

...

Desktop apps and clouds (with video)

2010-07-23 02:50

I enjoy creating desktop applications. That means I may be a member of a dying breed, since web apps are going to make us all obsolete next week, but I do enjoy doing it.

The bad side of it is, of course that sometimes it's much more convenient to use a web application. For example, I have abandoned my own baby (uRSSus) because google reader is just easier and more convenient to use.

But then I thought... what bothers me of uRSSus? And there are quite a few things!

It's not in all computers I may use

That means I will not ever be able to use it exclusively.
It's pretty useless without an Internet connection (but so is google reader mostly)
Since I can't use it exclusively, I end with feeds on uRSSus that are not on google reader and viceversa.
It's freaking slow

So, I decided to see what I could do about that without giving up the good side of uRSSus:

It looks much nicer than a web app, because it looks like a desktop app
It does things like opening the site instead of showing the feed item (great for partial content feeds)
I wrote it (yes, that's a feature for me. I like self-made programs)

So, this attempt at rewriting the desktop RSS reader produced this:

As you can see in the above video, this reader syncs the subscription list to google reader. It will also eventually sync your read/unread posts.

It still can open full sites instead of feed items, it has/will have a heck of an offline mode (full pages captured as images, for example), and... it's very very fast.

It's much faster than google reader in Chromium, and hella faster than uRSSus. That was done via smarter coding, so it probably means I was braindead before and experienced a minor recovery.

The code is not fit for release (for example, the database schema will change) but you can try it: http://code.google.com/p/kakawana/source/checkout

Slow-Slow and Fast-Fast (video)

2010-07-17 03:53

My previous post explained how to cache whole web pages as images. Now see it in action. This is a lightweight RSS reader, optimized for comic books (but it works for any feed) and for offline use (but it works online too, of course).

Not ready for public use yet, but if you look around you can find the code somewhere ;-)

Capturing a webpage as an image using Pyhon and Qt

2010-07-16 19:58

For a small project I am doing I wanted the capability to see web pages offline. So, I started thinking of a way to do that, and all solutions were annoying or impractical.

So, I googled and found CutyCapt which uses Qt and WebKit to turn web pages into images. Good enough for me!

Since I wanted to use this from a PyQt app, it makes sense to do the same thing CutyCapt does, but as a python module/script, so here's a quick implementation that works for me, even if it lacks a bunch of CutyCapt's features.

With a little extra effort, it can even save as PDF or SVG, which would let you use it almost like a real web page.

You just use it like this:

python  capty.py http://www.kde.org kde.png

And here's the code [download capty.py]

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

"""This tries to do more or less the same thing as CutyCapt, but as a
python module.

This is a derived work from CutyCapt: http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//
// CutyCapt - A Qt WebKit Web Page Rendering Capture Utility
//
// Copyright (C) 2003-2010 Bjoern Hoehrmann <bjoern@hoehrmann.de>
//
// This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
// modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
// as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
// of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
//
// This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
// GNU General Public License for more details.
//
// $Id$
//
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

"""

import sys
from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui, QtWebKit


class Capturer(object):
    """A class to capture webpages as images"""

    def __init__(self, url, filename):
        self.url = url
        self.filename = filename
        self.saw_initial_layout = False
        self.saw_document_complete = False

    def loadFinishedSlot(self):
        self.saw_document_complete = True
        if self.saw_initial_layout and self.saw_document_complete:
            self.doCapture()

    def initialLayoutSlot(self):
        self.saw_initial_layout = True
        if self.saw_initial_layout and self.saw_document_complete:
            self.doCapture()

    def capture(self):
        """Captures url as an image to the file specified"""
        self.wb = QtWebKit.QWebPage()
        self.wb.mainFrame().setScrollBarPolicy(
            QtCore.Qt.Horizontal, QtCore.Qt.ScrollBarAlwaysOff)
        self.wb.mainFrame().setScrollBarPolicy(
            QtCore.Qt.Vertical, QtCore.Qt.ScrollBarAlwaysOff)

        self.wb.loadFinished.connect(self.loadFinishedSlot)
        self.wb.mainFrame().initialLayoutCompleted.connect(
            self.initialLayoutSlot)

        self.wb.mainFrame().load(QtCore.QUrl(self.url))

    def doCapture(self):
        self.wb.setViewportSize(self.wb.mainFrame().contentsSize())
        img = QtGui.QImage(self.wb.viewportSize(), QtGui.QImage.Format_ARGB32)
        painter = QtGui.QPainter(img)
        self.wb.mainFrame().render(painter)
        painter.end()
        img.save(self.filename)
        QtCore.QCoreApplication.instance().quit()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    """Run a simple capture"""
    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    c = Capturer(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2])
    c.capture()
    app.exec_()

Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

Posts about qt (old posts, page 11)