Question

I’m testing different languages to developp a desktop application for Mac&Windows.

I thought that Python+Wx worth a try so I wrote a simple hello world.

Then, I tried the py2app to package my application as a Mac application.

What a surprise to find that my hellworld.app weight as much as 75 MB !! (then I have an error at runtime but that’s not the question)

Here is my question : is there a way to distribute a standalone wxPython application that weight less than a few MB ? (for instance, an adress book app).

(a Swing HelloWorld is around 3KB, plus around 20MB for the JRE)

Thank you

Answer 1

I would highly remmoend you using PyINstaller, which can be found here: link

it works like a chamr for me so far and it support most of the major libraries:
wxpython pyqt and even django (although i dont really understand the whole django support thing 😉 )

PyInstaller is a program that converts (packages) Python programs into stand-alone executables, under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Its main advantages over similar tools are that PyInstaller works with any version of Python since 2.2, it builds smaller executables thanks to transparent compression, it is fully multi-platform, and use the OS support to load the dynamic libraries, thus ensuring full compatibility.

The main goal of PyInstaller is to be compatible with 3rd-party packages out-of-the-box. This means that, with PyInstaller, all the required tricks to make external packages work are already integrated within PyInstaller itself so that there is no user intervention required. You’ll never be required to look for tricks in wikis and apply custom modification to your files or your setup scripts. As an example, libraries like PyQt, Django or matplotlib are fully supported, without having to handle plugins or external data files manually. Check our compatibility list of SupportedPackages.

i hope this helps, good luck and tell if you need anymore help