[Pythonmac-SIG] A newbie wonders about GUIs

[Bob Savage]

Since there has been some discussion of GUI alternatives for Python on the
Mac, I thought I would mention a couple. I can't say that these are perfect
methods for doing your GUI-Mac-Python thing (then again we were talking
about wxWindows, Qt, and TK, so...), and these are *NOT* cross-platform
options, but they deserve mention:

    PyObjC - using Cocoa stuff from Python. MacOSX only. Still in an early
state, but great promise.

    AppleScript Glue - With AppleScript Studio being able to make full
applications, it probably is possible to integrate with Python by calling
abck and forth, and/or launching python subroutines. Might be difficult to
pull it of, but we already had suggestions about calling from Python to
Java, and above (PyObjC) from Python to Objective-C, so I thought this was
worth a mention.

    Mac modules (Carbon wrappers) - MacPython comes with Python modules
which enable you to call through to the traditional MacOS ToolBox routines.
For those who don't know what the toolbox is, think an earlier version of
Carbon. Of the three methods here, this would have to be considered the most
mature method for creating a GUI on the Mac, in fact nothing else really
compares with it, in this regard, with the possible exception of TKinter.

To sum up: For those new to the MacPython scene, things might look bleak
because none of the methods are perfect (stable, cross-platform,
feature-rich, and lick-able), but really there are many exciting projects,
and, although the introduction of OSX has, in the short run, made things
more complicated, it has jump-started several projects (Qt, was already
mentioned in this respect). The roads are not paved, but things are exciting
-- this is the life of the MacOSX-Pythoniers!

Bob