Use favicon as window icon in native mode

[falkoschindler]

In #620, #633 and #634 we discussed ways to use the favicon argument of ui.run for the window icon in native mode. So far there haven't been convincing solutions. Since #620 is not a bug but a missing feature and it's currently not actively developed, I'll create a new feature request. Maybe someone has an idea how to implement it? Or maybe pywebview comes up with a API for us to use.

[FabianGoessling]

Hi, i am currently testing some possible solutions, may i ask what exactly did not convince? #634 was rejected because of the platform specific dependencies, which is understandable. But if we agree on that, how should the feature ever be included if not provided by pywebview itself (which uses platform specific deps).
The example provided in #620 or #634 could maybe enhanced by getting the windows handle in a nicer way, but asides from that, this is how we could change the icon on the fly, similar to e.g. pysystray. Happy to hear your ideas :)

[rodja]

We want to avoid maintaining a platform specific solution. So you are right: Ideally this feature is implemented in pywebview itself. An alternative could be another (well-maintained) library which provides this feature.

[FabianGoessling]

Understood, but if i recall correctly the maintainer of pywebview stated that he has no intention of adding that feature and instead pyinstallers capabilities should be used as "freezing" the app is the standard way go.

Thus the only way of ever bringing the app icon to nicegui native is finding another package which has a "set_icon(window_handle, icon_path)" method and is working for any OS? Chances are minimal i guess..

So if ctypes or say a pywin32 variant are not in scope, the native mode won't have an icon out of the box soon.

[falkoschindler]

These are very valid points, @FabianGoessling. We would really like to see custom app icons in native NiceGUI apps.
I just discussed this matter with @rodja. We come to the conclusion that there's probably no better way than to include some platform-specific code.

• But in contrast to PR added native mode icon support #634 we should improve the separation, e.g. move all icon-related code into a module native_icon.py, so that native.py only needs to import and call it.
• Furthermore we should use the favicon argument from ui.run (e.g. via the globals module) to avoid the need for another ui.run parameter.
• Since favicon can be all kinds of things like emojis and URLs, native_icon.py could simply raise a NotImplementedError in these cases for now.

What do you think? Would you like to create a pull request? 🙂

[FabianGoessling]

Makes sense, ill be happy to share my solution when it is ready. I suspect I will have to stick with ctypes as eg pywin32 would add another dep. Agree?

Points one and two are fine for me, but i think a NotImplementedError might suggest that it is raised because no one put in the work yet. But including an icon converter or something like that might not be the way to go, so i think the error needs to be something more "strict". Will look into that when i have a running solution..

[rodja]

I suspect I will have to stick with ctypes as eg pywin32 would add another dep. Agree?

Yes, that would be ideal.

a NotImplementedError might suggest that it is raised because no one put in the work yet

I think it would be awesome if we integrate a emoji to bitmap converter for this feature later on... and it may not even be to hard, I hope.

[rwaal]

Hey everyone, I was just wondering if there’s been any recent activity around the topic of icons? It’s been almost a year since the last update in this thread. I’m not trying to push anything, just curious about the current status. Thanks!

[jdegenstein]

I would also like to know if what @raphaelproux pointed out is relevant to nicegui, thanks for the great project by the way!

[falkoschindler]

I'm not sure. You can already try setting an icon using the generic start arguments like this:

from nicegui import app, ui

app.native.start_args['icon'] = 'icon.png'
ui.label('Hello world!')

ui.run(native=True)

It doesn't work for me though. But the reason might be that it requires GTK or QT, and I'm on macOS?

[jdegenstein]

Thank you, I tried on Windows and the above sample does not work either.

[falkoschindler]

Hm, does it work in a plain pywebview example?

import webview

webview.create_window('Hello World', html='<h1>Hello, World!</h1>')
webview.start(icon='icon.png')

[jdegenstein]

Unfortunately no, that also does not work on Windows.