[GSoC] Week One - Pybombs Frontend & Design Idea

One week into GSoC coding period and I have been working on finalizing the GUI design for Pybombs. While I was writing the proposal for GSoC, I had in mind a design similar to the Synaptic package manager. Synaptic is one of the popular GUI front-ends for the apt tool and anyone coming from the Debian and Ubuntu world will more than agree to it.

Another graphical package manager that picqued my interest is Pamac, a GTK3 based GUI frontend for pacman(The package manager for Arch Linux) and ships with the Antergos distro. Both Pamac and Synaptic have a table view which lists out the packages available, followed by a brief description and other information like version number etc., in the subsequent columns.

The Pybombs1 appstore had a grid view displaying the OOT Modules with an icon for each module. Although the UI looked simple, with the lack of proper branding of OOT Modules, only one thumbnail picture appeared for most of the OOT Modules. The reason behind choosing the tableview approach mentioned above is to keep the UI simple and clean, while providing a bit more information on the OOT Modules like the version number, repository URL, etc., that are available from the recipe files.

Progress and Update for next Week

Currently, all the design and development is being done on Antergos distro and I am using PyQt5 as the GUI toolkit along with Qt Designer to design most of the UI. Although most of the design is complete, I am still working on polishing certain areas of the design. In the next week, I intend to bind the existsing pybombs API with the UI and come up with a minimalistic frontend for Pybombs. I will post my progress and design files on the mailing list during next week to get feedback on the design before proceeding with any changes to the original pybombs repo.

Pip Pip !