

Show HN: Kronos Notebook – IPython as a Mac App - PieSquared
http://kronosnotebook.com/

======
gourneau
There is a open source and free version of the IPython notebook as a OS X app,
that has been around since 2013.

[https://github.com/liyanage/ipython-
notebook/wiki](https://github.com/liyanage/ipython-notebook/wiki)

It has a very comprehensive set of scientific Python packages included with
it, numpy, pandas, etc.

------
PieSquared
Hey all! I'm really excited to announce this first release of Kronos Notebook,
which is just IPython [0] packaged as a Mac app totally independent of any
external environment. It comes with its own Python interpreter and package
database, so the installation should consist literally only downloading the
zip file, unzipping it into /Applications (or anywhere else you want to put
it), and double clicking on it to run it.

If you'd like to see some of the cool things it can do, I recommend typing in
the examples on the website (apologies – for now they're images...). In
particular, the last example on the website demonstrating interactive widgets
is my favorite :)

It includes a number of built-in packages and is capable of installing
(through a dialog) many others – should work on most PyPi packages, though not
ones that require linking to C libraries that aren't installed. You can export
created notebooks to HTML and do all the other nice stuff IPython usually lets
you.

This was created along the way to Kronos Haskell [1], which is my IHaskell
IPython kernel [2] packaged together with GHC and Cabal by building on top of
ghc-dot-app [3]. I took this as an opportunity to experiment with delivering a
final, product ready Mac app, including the website, pricing, billing, etc. As
a result, I'd love to have any feedback you have on anything, whether it's the
application itself, the pricing, the website, or anything else. Happy to
answer questions about anything, of course.

As an aside, note that there are some other alternatives to this, such as [4].
I think that Kronos is a bit more polished and self-contained – I really tried
to go from "proof of concept" stage to "finalized application" stage. Those
alternatives, however, were definitely a source of inspiration in coming to do
this (though not in any code or structure or anything), so I think they're
worth mentioning.

If you have any issues, please let me know. This is still a work in progress!

[0] [http://ipython.org/notebook.html](http://ipython.org/notebook.html) [1]
[http://www.kronosnotebook.com/haskell](http://www.kronosnotebook.com/haskell)
[2]
[https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell](https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell)
[3] [https://github.com/ghcformacosx/ghc-dot-
app](https://github.com/ghcformacosx/ghc-dot-app) [4]
[https://github.com/mangecoeur/ipython-
desktop](https://github.com/mangecoeur/ipython-desktop)

~~~
wcbeard10
> It comes with its own Python interpreter and package database

Assuming it's similar for the IHaskell version, is it tricky integrating with
cabal sandboxes (or for that matter, on the python side, virtualenv)?

~~~
PieSquared
Both of those rely on having proper cabal/ghc or python/virtualenv
preinstalled on the host computer; you could ship cabal/ghc and
python/virtualenv and then use a sandbox or virtualenv, but at that point you
might as well just use separate package databases. (This at least was the
original motivation for the split – I suspect you could do similar things with
virtualenv/sandboxes, it's certainly not the only point in the design space.)

