Cross-platform GUI development

[Eric Brunel]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:13:29 +0200, psaffrey at googlemail.com  
<psaffrey at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I've been programming in Python for 5 or more years now and whenever I
> want a quick-n-dirty GUI, I use Tkinter. This is partly because it's
> the first toolkit I learnt, but also because it's part of the standard
> Python distribution and therefore easy to get Python apps to work
> cross platform - it usually requires almost no porting effort.
>
> However, when I need a little bit more grunt, I tend to turn to Tix,
> which I thought was also fairly standard. However, this week, I wrote
> a Tix application under Linux which I'd really like to work on Mac OS
> and it's proving fairly painful to get it going. There is no Tix in
> the standard fink or apt repositories and when I download a tar-ball,
> it wouldn't build because it had a lot of unmet dependencies. I then
> read a post which said that only Tkinter/Python people really use Tix
> anymore and people in tcl/tk moved onto better toolkits long ago.
>
> My question is if Tix is old hat, what is the GUI toolkit I *should*
> be using for quick-n-dirty cross platform GUI development?

Since you're already used to Tkinter, I'd say: just wait... tcl/tk 8.5 is  
on the way and it will bring a lot of new and long-awaited widgets, along  
with native look on most platforms. See here:
http://wiki.tcl.tk/14796
and here for the look:
http://tktable.sf.net/tile/

Note that there are already Tkinter wrappers for these widgets, but they  
may not be the ones that'll end up in the official distribution. If you  
want to play with them, you can find them here:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=165637
(download tkinter-wrappers)

If you want to use these, you'll of course also need the latest beta of  
tcl/tk 8.5, downloadable from here:
http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.html

> I hope this isn't a stupid question. I'm wearing flame retardant
> underwear.

You won't need these much around here... ;-)

HTH
-- 
python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in  
'U(17zX(%,5.zmz5(17l8(%,5.Z*(93-965$l7+-'])"