[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: Best Python GUI for Arabic, etc.

[Gary Shao]

Hi,

Thanks Kevin for the update on wxPython. I've only recently tried 
running an existing wxPython
script that works fine on Linux and Windows machines on a Mac OS X box. 
I quite quickly
observed some of the visual irregularities mentioned when people talk 
about the status of
wxPython on the Mac. The most readily apparent problems were rounded 
buttons that were
surrounded by white rectangles and tab headers that had poor spacing 
when compared to
what appeared on Linux and Windows. Another problem that showed up on 
the Mac version
was the GetValue method of a wxTextCtrl object not returning the correct 
value unless
the user manually changed the value (for instance simply backspacing 
over one letter of the
default value shown and typing the same letter back in).

When I looked through the wxPython site, I could find no mention of 
known problems with the
Mac implementation. This meant there was no way to know whether any 
problems I found
were already known and whether they were already fixed for later 
releases, planned for being
worked on, or would continue in later versions until someone addressed 
them.  I'm interested in
writing Python applications that are truly cross-platform, and would 
appreciate having some
pointers on where the status of specific Mac issues can be found. Thanks 
again.

    --Gary

> There should be a wxPython 2.5.1 release in the very near future (1-2 
> weeks max, maybe even sometime next week) and from my testing on 
> Panther there have been major improvements. It still uses 5-9% CPU 
> time on idle, but maxes out at about 20% as opposed to the 50% max Bob 
> measured previously (yes, that's when using wxSTC). Load times range 
> in the 4-6 second range, depending on what else you've got going on. 
> Most of my testing was on an 800Mhz iMac, but it seemed even faster on 
> my 1Ghz PowerBook. =)
>
> And we're not done yet. =) In the very near future, Classic support is 
> getting separated so that we can maximize the Carbon port using Carbon 
> Events, etc. This should bring down the idle CPU time down even 
> further as we delegate more of the idle event handling to Apple's 
> Window Manager. We're also going to implement HIView for Jaguar+.
>
> As for Unicode support, there's still a few issues to be worked out, 
> the main one being that Mac APIs use short-wchar-t (2 bytes) while 
> wxMac expects the 4-byte implementation. The result is that we get 
> clipped text. This shouldn't be difficult to resolve, however 
> (implement --fshort-wchar in configure and maybe set a define), and 
> once I get out the latest release of wxMozilla I'll take a look into 
> making this work.
>
> However, while wxPython 2.5 is probably more stable than its 2.4 
> counterpart, this is all very new so unless you're adventurous and 
> have patience for dealing with the little quirks that arise, it might 
> be best as Bob suggested to prototype the app in PyObjC, and then come 
> back to wxPython when you need to really make your app cross-platform. 
> Either that, or start writing your code on Linux or Windows using 
> wxPython then move it over to Mac later. I would also agree that 
> wxPython is a better choice than Tkinter and pyQT/pyGTK for Mac, but 
> then again I'm a bit biased. ;-)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kevin
>
>
>