It’s been another monster month for us.

It was great meeting everyone at PyCon, and the crowds around our table were awesome! Check out my 5-minute talk from the conference: Making the Web More Pythonic

As always, we’re improving Anvil all the time. Here are a few things you might have missed:

1. Beautiful apps: New Material Design theme

We’ve published a new Material Design theme! We’ve given our components a facelift and added swappable colour schemes, so it’s now even easier to build beautiful apps.

(Don’t worry, the old theme is still there - it’s now called “Classic”.)

2. Simple objects in Data Tables

If you want to store richer data, you can now add “Simple Object” columns to your Data Tables. These can store strings, numbers, lists, or dicts - that’s any JSON object. And you can search inside them with a powerful query system.

Find out more on our blog: https://anvil.works/blog/simple-object-storage

3. Looking after the details

Here are some things we’ve done this month to make Anvil even more pleasing to use:

  • Easier code navigation - you can hold down the Ctrl key and click on a function or variable to jump to its definition.

  • The new FlowPanel lets you lay out components side-to-side. It’s great for grouping buttons, links or labels right next to each other.

  • We’ve made it easier to drag and drop Link components, so it’s clearer whether you’re dropping something next to a Link or inside it. (I love this when I’m building sidebars for navigation!)

  • More options for displaying images in Image components: Shrink to fit, zoom to fill, or display your image at its original size no matter how big your page is.

  • Want your components closer together, or further apart? Now you can control the spacing in a ColumnPanel with the column_spacing property.

  • We’ve made the Toolbox easier to navigate by highlighting the most commonly used components.

  • Fixed-width layouts are easier now too, with the XYPanel. Most of the time, you won’t be needing a fixed-width layout, but when you do, it’s right there.

Happy building!

Meredydd