I say it often, but there is a big pot of money for someone who makes a nice form designer-Python IDE. Specifying a UI in code is a pain in the ass because you have to mentally model how it will look as well as behave. This isn't ideal to do in a text editor, so it's very common to rough it out with pencil and paper or something and then work from that design.
But dropping widgets from a palette onto a blank form and then moving them around with the mouse until they look about right is easy for most people, and saves them a step of analog drawing and then translating that to code. And a few widgets on a form are often Good Enough to provide an accessible UI.
For backend programmers who get ideas about compiling/collecting data and then organizing it into a neat structure where it can be manipulated in useful ways, front-end frameworks are an irritating overhead that distracts from the main task. I make little command line tools for myself, but my non-technical friends get lost easily on the command line and don't find it a natural environment to work in. If something needs a light GUI I'll usually throw something together in Dash that they can use in a browser, but deep down I kinda hate webapps. I'd like to be able to just give them an app that looks and feels like a native desktop tool even if it has very minimal functionality.
Will such lightweight and easy to use tools lead to a surfeit of poorly-designed applications with sorta sketchy widgets that kinda break OS UI guidelines. Yeah...but it'll also mean a lot more utilities that get used regularly rather than tried once and forgotten about, and get more people into programming that otherwise wouldn't try.
Although I completely agree that what you describe would be a great product. If you are throwing together GUIs with dash what's wrong with using electron for making them into web apps? is this more of a hassle than I am imagining?
I say it often, but there is a big pot of money for someone who makes a nice form designer-Python IDE. Specifying a UI in code is a pain in the ass because you have to mentally model how it will look as well as behave. This isn't ideal to do in a text editor, so it's very common to rough it out with pencil and paper or something and then work from that design.
But dropping widgets from a palette onto a blank form and then moving them around with the mouse until they look about right is easy for most people, and saves them a step of analog drawing and then translating that to code. And a few widgets on a form are often Good Enough to provide an accessible UI.
For backend programmers who get ideas about compiling/collecting data and then organizing it into a neat structure where it can be manipulated in useful ways, front-end frameworks are an irritating overhead that distracts from the main task. I make little command line tools for myself, but my non-technical friends get lost easily on the command line and don't find it a natural environment to work in. If something needs a light GUI I'll usually throw something together in Dash that they can use in a browser, but deep down I kinda hate webapps. I'd like to be able to just give them an app that looks and feels like a native desktop tool even if it has very minimal functionality.
Will such lightweight and easy to use tools lead to a surfeit of poorly-designed applications with sorta sketchy widgets that kinda break OS UI guidelines. Yeah...but it'll also mean a lot more utilities that get used regularly rather than tried once and forgotten about, and get more people into programming that otherwise wouldn't try.