Development of the Livebook Desktop Application

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Development of the Livebook Desktop Application
Wojtek Mach's presentation covers the journey of building Livebook Desktop, a user-friendly interactive and collaborative code notebook designed for the Elixir programming language. Initially, the project aimed to simplify the installation process and create desktop integration for Elixir applications. Challenges throughout development included dealing with system dependencies, operating system-specific GUI quirks, and maintaining forks of external libraries to fix bugs and add necessary functionality. The team initially utilized cross-platform GUI toolkits like WxWidgets, but faced limitations leading them to adopt native GUIs for MacOS and Windows. As a result, they developed ElixirKit, a library for bridging native GUI applications with Elixir back-end code. Despite difficulties such as learning native GUI coding practices, the outcome has been a streamlined desktop experience for Livebook users. Notably, the project even briefly explored the possibility of Livebook on iPads before settling with the current desktop versions due to OS process limitations on iOS.

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