I wonder whether this discussion should be split into a separate thread as GUI design was not a central part of Vizcon (though I definitely think it’s an interesting topic).
Concerning web based GUI (that you can deploy locally via electron, of course not with the same performance of a native solution) Interact is compatible with Plots, see here for more information. In particular the PlotlyJS backend allows you to embed an interactive plot inside a GUI.
For Makie + GUI I personally think there are at least two ways ahead (not mutually exclusive):
- Create a web based backend for Makie so that it can be embedded in a web based Interact GUI while preserving plot interactivity (you can of course already embed it as png)
- Add Makie as an Interact backend. Interact has a framework to allow backends (originally thought as CSS frameworks) which could be recycled to also support Makie native widgets as an implementation. In this way the same syntax of Interact (say
@manipulateand friends) could be used with Makie backend to create efficient native widgets.
I’m quite excited about 2. as it would be a big plus to have a “pure julia” native GUI library: I haven’t looked at it concretely, but there are definitely some low hanging fruit. In particular, it’d be nice for users to be able to use the same syntax for web and native GUIs.