[Edu-sig] GTK+ widgets, other odds and ends

[Kirby Urner]

I thought I'd give GTK+ a try using pygtk 2.0, and so far I'm feeling
pleasantly rewarded.  GTK is a Gnome thing, but has been ported to Windows
as well and has a native-enough look and feel.  I think mono (.NET for
Linux) is going to be GTK based (I've done some C# in mono, but nothing with
widgets).  Even GIMP, for which GTK was originally evolved, is now running
in Windows (I haven't tested it myself).

Anyway, I'm going through the tutorial and lo and behold I can run the
examples from within IDLE (the new one, with 2.3) without any of the hang
problems that typically accompany widget fun and games.

Ideas for doing this came from Simon Willison's pointer to matplotlib [1],
which uses GTK+ (I followed the instructions there for getting the libraries
installed, including that change to the Windows PATH):  
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/installing.html

The tutorial I'm following (which is quite recent) is here:
http://www.moeraki.com/pygtktutorial/pygtk2tutorial/index.html

Another success today was finally doing fractals direct to PNG using PIL --
cutting out POV-Ray as the middleman.  I've updated my fractals page to
register this step:  http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/fractals.html (I'm sure
I'm not the first to do this -- just registering a small personal
satisfaction).

And another thing:  now that I have better cgi support at my ISP (switched
to DigitalSpace after Internet Arena went under, taking my website with it),
I was able to get py2html working so that .py files get colorized and
anchor-tagged on the fly.  No more saving separating source and html
versions (fractals.py has an example of this).

Kirby

[1] still trying to get this added to edu-sig page, but am having troubles
with public keys, cvs etc.  We made a step today towards getting that
resolved, but still not there yet.