Exactly three months ago, I wrote The magic of Amazon’s Kiro: my 1st vibe-coded PyQt6 app! It was meant to introduce a PyQt6 Linux app for browsing a selection of comic strips from GoComics, called Comic Strip Browser and hosted both on GitHub (with sources) and on SourceForge (only the binaries).

I revisited the project and made some corrections and improvements:#

In brief:

What’s New in v1.1.1

  • Added Random button for navigation to discover comics
  • Added First button for navigation to the first presence of a comic on GoComics.com
  • Keyboard shortcuts: Left/Right arrows: Previous/Next, Home/End: First/Today
  • Improved error handling and UI stability
  • Added RPM packaging support for Fedora/RHEL
  • Added Windows build alternative with cx_Freeze (but this one fails, too!)
  • Fixed image format detection (PNG/GIF files now cached with correct extensions)
  • Removed the logging which was useless, anyway

The status bar is now informative.

I also fixed the starting dates for the supported comic titles:

  1. Calvin and Hobbes – since 1985-11-18
  2. Peanuts – since 1950-10-16
  3. Peanuts Begins – since 1950-10-16 (Reprint series; for old dates can be identical to Peanuts, only in color)
  4. Garfield – since 1978-06-19
  5. Wizard of Id – since 2002-01-01 (Limited GoComics availability)
  6. Wizard of Id Classics – since 2014-11-17
  7. Pearls before Swine – since 2002-01-07
  8. Shoe – since 2001-04-08 (Limited GoComics availability)
  9. B.C. – since 2002-01-01 (Limited GoComics availability)
  10. Back to B.C. – since 2015-09-21 (Recent reprint series)
  11. Pickles – since 2003-01-01 (Limited GoComics availability)
  12. WuMo – since 2013-10-13 (With gaps)
  13. Speed Bump – since 2002-01-01 (Limited GoComics availability)
  14. Free Range – since 2007-02-03
  15. Off the Mark – since 2002-09-02 (Limited GoComics availability)

Note that some comic titles, especially in their early days, can have large gaps in availability.

On SourceForge, I updated the 4 screenshots, but here I can post more screenshots, as I tested the version 1.1.1 on:

  • Ubuntu MATE 24.04 — on my laptop
  • Fedora 42 KDE — Live ISO used to build the .rpm!
  • Fedora 43 KDE (20251015.n.0) — Live ISO
  • LMDE 7 — Live ISO
  • Lubuntu 25.10 — Live ISO

Kiro (Claude) helped with these minor changes, but it added more bugs than it fixed. I should have hunted the bugs myself and only let Kiro create the RPM .spec and other boring stuff. Kiro is even able to be that stupid:

Oops! I accidentally deleted the .git folder. Let me fix that:

Nothing beats Kiro in creating new bugs, though. Or in forgetting what the purpose of a change was, what was the bug we were hunting, or that the bug needs to be fixed, not the error message!

In the end, given the difficulties in building a PyQt6 self-contained Windows binary with either PyInstaller or cx_Freeze, I suppose PyQt6 is the wrong cross-platform framework. Maybe I should learn Avalonia UI.