[AstroPy] AstroPy Digest, Vol 81, Issue 12

[Matthew Turk]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Perry Greenfield <stsci.perry at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 21, 2013, at 8:35 AM, Timothy Pickering wrote:
>
>>> Yes, I've long felt that was a critical element to a good GUI. They are great to play with the data, and how to view the data. But at some point, one wants to be able to repeat that easily, either to do batch processing, replicate the results (perhaps to tweak a bit more), or be consistent in the processing of other similar data. It would be even better if the GUI could save a script that effectively recreates what was done without requiring any interaction (rather than a lot of hidden machinery to recreate the state).
>>
>> you mean like a .ipynb file? :)  ipython notebooks aren't that far from being a viable platform for building and distributing GUIs.  what's needed, though, are tools for better interactivity using javascript, D3, and the like.  even so, their current incarnation provides a much greater level of interactivity than a normal script while retaining portability and flexibility.
>>
>> tim
>
> Well, partly. What IPython doesn't provide is interactive selections on graphics and such, yet (at least entirely within the browser). For example, if I want to plot a spectrum and then select features to fit, or mark initial guesses for centers, etc, IPython doesn't do that. I do think that may be within reach in a year or two.

Brian Granger recently posted a lengthy summary of the plans for
IPython post-1.0, which addresses interactivity directly:

http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/ipython-dev/2013-June/011764.html

>From my discussions with Fernando Perez where we discussed swapping
the yt web GUI to live on top of IPython instead of a homegrown
kernel/server approach, he made it abundantly clear that
reproducibility of GUI/widget/interactive elements in the notebook was
a top design priority.  (Our current approach records all scripting
commands and is mediated by python code, but overall leaves a great
deal to be desired.)  Reproducibility of notebook widgets would be a
good topic for discussion at the reproducibility BOF at SciPy this
year, which Fernando will be a panelist at.

-Matt

>
> Perry
>
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