macOS floating windows or widgets

[RoyalIcing]

Just watched a great presentation of Livebook by José at the Elixir Sydney meetup.

Seeing all power of smart cells e.g. the machine learning models I thought how amazing it would if ordinary people could access these UIs. e.g. If the transcribe audio smart cell could be its own little floating window.

I could imagine it living in the system menu bar: click the icon and then see a smart cell!

Or the macOS Sonoma added interactive widget support to the desktop — imagine being able to render a live-updating chart onto your desktop. Or have an interactive widget to record your voice and transcribe it.

Or the final idea is that you could select some code and extract it out into its own little mini Mac app using the same app shell that Livebook itself uses.

How this could integrated I’m not sure, perhaps it could be a new Kino call or some way to nominate a particular Livebook document to elevated status.

I have experience building Mac apps so I could help contribute code to this initiative.

[josevalim]

That's probably a bit too much out of scope for Livebook but the neat thing about Livebook is that you can extract our code, put them into our own app/LiveViews, and ship your own app with all of these features and more :D

[hugobarauna]

@RoyalIcing Besides the Mac App approach for mini-apps, another approach could be to use the the Livebook Apps feature (deploy a notebook as an app).

I myself have multiple Livebook apps running that I use for all sorts of different workflows: