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This is the community forum for my apps Pythonista and Editorial.
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Today Widget
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Wondering if there's any plan to include a Today widget. I've seen it mentioned before but most people overlook one of the main advantages.
With a Today widget, it would (theoretically) be possible to run a script without needing to open the app at all, and even without unlocking the device. Currently, there are several ways to run scripts via URLs, Workflow, etc. but they all require you to switch to the app and unlock the device if it's locked. With a Today widget, I could pull down, trigger a background script, get a notification (or a status indicator in the Today widget) when it had finished, and be on my way much faster. I have several plans for scripts that I really want to be able to trigger from the lock screen, and this would allow me to do that.
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Any confirmation of whether or not this feature is planned?
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Not planned at the moment. I've experimented in this direction, but I found that the memory limitations for Today widgets are too severe for most use cases. A Today widget only gets about 10MB of RAM before it's terminated by the system, and it's very easy to run into this limit with even relatively simple scripts.
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Out of curiosity... how much RAM does the Python interpreter need to run, i. e. how much does it use once it's started up and ready to run code? 10 MB really isn't a lot. This would be a situation where Lua would be a lot more suitable, after all one of its main features is that it is very memory-light.
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I see, so there's no way to have the Today widget trigger a background task without the memory limit?
I guess the limit makes sense, if you had lots of Today widgets that used a bunch of memory you could have all sorts of problems.
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If all you're trying to do is launch a pythonista script you could use something like the launch center pro today widget with an action that launches a pythonista script via callback url.
