[IPython-dev] Jupyter/IPython for beginner

[Antonino Ingargiola]

Hi to all,

lately I have written a few notebooks that I tend to "see" as
self-contained quasi-graphical application that even users with no
programming experience can reasonably use. There are use cases in which a
notebook can be used by just changing the input file name or tweaking some
parameter. The widgets are powerful addons to include some more advanced
interactivity.

The only problem with this vision is that all the needed software is still
not exactly straightforward to install (mostly on Windows and OSX), and
running the Jupyter Notebook app can be confusing (think of users that have
never used a terminal, explain the start-up folder issue, etc...). conda
and Anaconda are great tools but there a still quite a few steps compared
to a click and run application.

So,I'd like to raise two issue/question.

#1 I'm trying to collect some "absolute beginner" friendly documentation to
go from 0 to "knowing how to start, stop and run a notebook on a local
machine". The only resource that I know is the OpenTechSchool tutorial[1]
(and I, for one, also wrote a short tutorial[2]). But this kind of
documentation with all the practical steps spelled out tends to become
outdated pretty quickly. So maybe, could be useful to build a concise page
like "Jupyther Notebook for the absolute beginner" (or something like that)
that will help novice users to get started, that is prominently advertised
and that is easy to maintain (i.e. short).

#2, except for the documentation, has anybody ever worked on a "starter
app" for notebooks. Something between pyinstaller and an ipython launcher.
If you think of a notebook as an app (not as a document) it makes sense
that the notebook shows up with a double click, without installing anything
else. In this case the notebook may be read-only by default.

Any pointers, ideas?

Antonio
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