[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: GUI tools--for Troy

[Troy Rollins]

Kevin said :

> I agree with you about Komodo. I wish it were available on OS X. The Mac
> is a big void for ActiveState. There have been periodic requests for a
> Mac port, but apparently they are concerned about a) the commercial
> viability of such an effort and b) some considerable technical hurdles
> surrounding their text component (Scintilla) which has not been fully
> ported to the Mac.

Komodo moving to Mac would be an extremely welcomed thing. Black adder
as well. Either one was available, I probably wouldn't have had
anything to say - I'd just be working.

> 
> Boa Contructor is not usable except with an obsolete version of wxPython
> (2.4.x), it has not been updated in two years, and so I have never been
> able to give it a real try.

Yes. Conceptually it looks pretty good, though I would imagine it to
be pretty buggy. In fact, everything I have seen relating to tools for
Python on the Mac are pretty buggy and incomplete.

> 
> 
> One thing to keep in mind with Komodo is that while it has a GUI
> builder, I believe it only supports Tk/Tkinter. That's not surprising,
> given that ActiveState's bread and butter is Tcl. I myself like Tk, but
> I also develop in Tcl: I'm learning Python as a way into the more
> comprehensive  GUI toolkits that it supports. (To me Tkinter just looks
> like a weird mangling of Tk code, and doesn't interest me.)

I like a GUI builder primarily for simple apps, and prototyping.
Coming from the Director world, I'm also quite well-versed in building
every individual GUI component myself from bitmaps and vectors. Coding
the GUI doesn't scare me, I just don't want that to be the ONLY way to
get a GUI with a couple of buttons and a text field, for instance.

> 
> In other words, if you want a commercial GUI builder for something other
> than Tk, you're back to wxDesigner or Black Adder/Qt. Or, coding the
> stuff by hand in Komodo. But if you're moving to Linux, Black Adder
> might be a good route. (Assuming theKompany doesn't go belly up in the
> interim...)

Black adder would be a great route. But it can't build for OSX. Am I
wrong in thinking that the Tk GUIs created with Komodo on Linux shold
be buildable for OSX delivery? Even still, I'll likely use hand-coded
wx more often anyway...
> 
-- 
Troy Rollins
RPSystems, Ltd.
www.rpsystems.net