PBP User Interface

[danellecline]

This is a feature request to add a UI to simplify use.

John R. has put together a rough mockup PBP_MenuMockup.pdf

My vote would be to use something like Flask for this development. This pure Python approach is simple and fast to debug/ develop. Users should still be able to use pbp with the

pip install mbari-pbp

Then, a user interface could have be called through something like:

pbp-ui

[carueda]

Thanks @danellecline for capturing this ticket. I saw @ryjombari's GUI mockup in slack.

Agree, makes a lot of sense to have a python based mechanism.

Quick reactions triggered by your mentioning Flask:

• I have only used Flask for http APIs, not at all its templating features, etc., which would be more for the GUI itself (correct?) thus becoming a web based UI
• In any case, I wonder if there's a preference for a "native" GUI?

EDIT: "native" in the sense of not being via typical web browser (python based would be perfectly fine).

Actually, when I saw John's message on slack I thought about the possibility of a web based approach, you know, at that point due to the potential of leveraging our Vue experience there ... except (I also thought) a web based app might not be the desirable mechanism.

Let's of course continue the discussion to determine a good strategy.

FWIW There are tools out there that allow to convert a web based app into a native one. For example, I've got some promising results enabling a Vue webapp as a native application using Tauri. In fact, technically speaking, I can say it's been very successful already. But I haven't yet looked into other important aspects like signing and notarizing. So far, this exercise has been only exploratory–there's no requirement for this in any project (at least at the moment).