We just completed a wonderful journey over at Talk Python Training.
We offer over 240 hours of Python course videos at Talk Python. Of course, we want our users to have the very best experience taking our courses. Unfortunately, the mobile web experience is less than ideal for watching video - especially video that is broken into small blocks best for reference usage after taking the course. For example, on iOS you can neither auto advance to the next video nor hide the navigation around the web browser leading postage stamp size videos you have to keep clicking. Yuck.
The most important missing feature is the ability to download and use our content offline (for trips, sketchy or restricted networks, and other situations).
Enter the mobile apps
Back in 2018, we knew this was a problem and build a set of mobile apps for phones and tablets on both iOS and Android. At the time, we chose Xamarin (as C# / .NET based mobile framework). It worked fairly well, but never gave the polished, truly professional experience I was hoping for. Still, it solved many of the shortcomings discussed above.
Since then, Xamarin has reached end of the line and will not be supported further. So the last thing we wanted to do is build on top of a dying framework.
Mobile apps, v2 (Flutter)
What framework to choose? After considering 3-4 options, I chose Flutter for our platform. It’s based on Dart, a nice language. The UI is beautiful. It compiles to native code on every platform (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux). And, it’s a very popular ecosystem with 3x the number of Github stars as Python (153k vs. 53k) and nearly 2x as many as React Native (110k).
After working many long days with the talented Loren Aguey (Flutter developer on this project), the next generation of Talk Python Training’s mobile apps are available on all the mobile app stores. Just look at this UI, brilliant.
Download the app
Get the app on your platform of choice. It comes in both a phone and tablet form-factor:
- iOS AppStore
- Android GooglePlay Store
- More to come
Like the new version? Please review it
If you like this new version of the Talk Python courses app, please consider taking a few minutes to review it at your platform’s app store. It’d make a big difference to us. Many of the existing reviews are either very old or are complaints about issues with the old version. Help us give the app’s public face a clean up.
Thank you to everyone who has supported me and Talk Python by taking one or more of our courses.