PySimpleGUI 6

I had heavily used PySimpleGUI in various work projects, and one day, when I had to run some older piece of code I had not run in a while, I get a notice that PySimpleGUI won't work, because was free, but nobody paid, and so, good luck! So I was piping mad, paid the 3-year or whatever the max license fee was, received a code, and THEN I was able to get my stuff to work, like it used to.

LESSON: N E V E R Use code that can "stop working" until you pay ransom. N E V E R.

At this point, it's irrelevant, because the LLMs can replace PySimpleGUI with PyQt etc so --- thanks but no thanks. I did like it because you could throw up something around a CLI and it looked at least presentable. Now, since 2025, nobody codes anymore, so ... seems to me, this PySimpleGUI 6 is just a bit of history.

I understand that people have had bad experiences and in general I don't want to pay for software components either. But it's weird how much hate there is against developers sometimes just for even trying to make money from their libraries.

NiceGUI is MIT licensed. Not perfect , but no bizarre shenanigans when it comes to releasing commercial software.

First they made it commercial. Then they realised there were not enough people prepared to pay for the project and shut down the project. But now it is back in free form?

This project started when I started my Ph.D.. I had a few interactions with the author when I added UI to some programs I wanted to showcase as TA.

Every time I needed a GUI, I reached out to this library. Very beginner friendly. Good memories.

It would be great to have a few screenshots on the readme.md or Doc pages to understand quickly what we‘re talking about.

Great to see this back as Open Source (LGPL 3.0). However, it points out the continuous need for proper funding for Open Source. Tough in ZIRP times, exponentially more difficult in more difficult economic times.

Loaded question but why does Visual Basic 6.0 (both the IDE and the language) for modern languages / OSes doesn't exist anymore? I feel like it was way ahead of its time and there is no similar RAD and GUI design tool ever since

Today I wanted to build a simple ui that maps time across 3 time zones.

After spending some time thinking about using it across my Mac and Linux machines, I just had Claude write an html file.

Nice, simple runs everywhere.

I remember looking into GUI libraries for Python a while back and this one and qt came up.

However I ended up settling on making a Web UI served via FastAPI. I'm still happy about that decision but this one sounded really nice back then.

I stopped using this when the dev did their rugpull and won't go back.

I think AI coding has made these "we dumb down a real UI framework for you" libraries obsolete. Anyone can get a GTK or QT app up and running now. This isn't a criticism, they were very useful to build GUIs in the past, but now they are just obsolete and more likely to introduce bugs or limitations you can't work around than to help much.

Hmm apart from distribution (which is a pain to set up) I still don't think you can beat QtWidgets and QtCreator for simplicity of getting a professional GUI. It has a form editor that actually works. I think maybe the only one I've ever used. Then you can pretty much just click on buttons and add event handlers. Very easy to get going and it scales very far.

There are a few downsides... there are better options than C++ these days (Rust most obviously), QtWidgets is in maintenance mode, it's a bit of a pain to make an installer from your app, and it doesn't really support modern styling.

But I'd still pick it over this in a heartbeat.

LOL, I remember this one being a famous traitor to FOSS by starting out as a community project and then closing doors to make money from it. Guess they weren't able to make any money after all. Karma in action.