Last year we introduced support for Matplotlib and Plotly charts. Both libraries are able to export charts as SVG images which are then displayed in a Flet app. However, such charts, while serving the purpose of visualization, are lacking interactivity and animation.
Today we are releasing Flet 0.5.2 with built-in charts 📊 based on the awesome fl_chart library!
We've just released Flet 0.4.0 with a super exciting new feature - packaging Flet apps into a standalone static website that can be run entirely in the browser! The app can be published to any free hosting for static websites such as GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages. Thanks to Pyodide - a Python port to WebAssembly!
You can quickly build awesome single-page applications (SPA) entirely in Python and host them everywhere! No HTML, CSS or JavaScript required!
Happy New Year! Flet project has reached ⭐️ 3.3K stars ⭐️ on GitHub which is very exciting and encouraging! Thank you all for your support!
We are starting this year with the release of Flet 0.3.2 bringing a long-awaited feature: creating standalone desktop bundles with a custom icon!
flet command has been used for running Flet program with hot reload, but we recently re-worked Flet CLI to support multiple actions.
There is a new flet pack command that wraps PyInstaller API to package your Flet Python app into a standalone Windows executable or macOS app bundle which can be run by a user with no Python installed.
Command's --icon argument is now changing not only executable's icon, but Flet's app window icon and the icon shown in macOS dock, Windows taskbar, macOS "About" dialog, Task Manager and Activity Monitor:
Bundle name, version and copyright can be changed too:
Find all available options for packaging desktop apps in the updated guide.
Upgrade Flet module to the latest version (pip install flet --upgrade), give flet pack command a try and let us know what you think!
This post is a continuation of Flet mobile strategy published a few months ago.
Our original approach to Flet running on a mobile device was Server-Driven UI. Though SDUI has its own benefits (like bypassing App Store for app updates) it doesn't work in all cases, requires web server to host Python part of the app and, as a result, adds latency which is not great for user actions requiring nearly instance UI response, like drawing apps.
I've been thinking on how to make Python runtime embedded into Flutter iOS or Android app to run user Python program. No doubt, it's technically possible as Kivy and BeeWare projects do that already.
Flet is a fast-evolving framework with a new functionality and bug fixes being committed every other day.
The development model with one pull request per release didn't work well for the project as users waited for weeks to get hands on a new release and, honestly, from development perspective producing large "heroic" releases takes a lot of energy 🫠.
From now on we'll be breaking releases into multiple pull requests with one feature/bugfix per PR.
Every PR merged into main branch will be publishing pre-release (developmental release) package to pypi.org having version format of X.Y.Z.devN.