[Tkinter-discuss] active icons with drag-and-drop
Eric S. Johansson
esj at harvee.org
Sun Apr 30 05:09:03 CEST 2006
my apologies for the long delayed response.
Michael Lange wrote:
> there is no built-in drag and drop support in Tk (I assume you mean
> to drag e.g. a filename to an icon on the windows desktop). If you
> want to do so, you need the tkdnd extension for Tk (not to be
> confused with python's Tkdnd module), which adds native drag and drop
> support for windows and unix platforms:
> <http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkdnd> and its python wrapper :
> <http://www.8ung.at/klappnase/TkinterDnD/TkinterDnD.html> .
your assumption is correct. I want to try to an icon on the desktop.
It sounds like that may be tkinter is not the way to go and that I would
be better off building my own framework (when I have copious spare time)
since what I want to do is relatively simple.
> The other things you mentioned should not be too hard (though I am
> not really sure what you mean by "icon changes" and "press and hold
> for a menu").
what I was interested in playing with was a user interface concept I
call "transformative icons". Specifically, you can drag-and-drop data
from one application to the icon, the icon attached program changes it
into some other form and clicking the icon place at the data into the
clipboard so you can paste it somewhere else. Other variants include
pressing and holding the icon to display a menu of options of
transformation or double-clicking to bring up menus for controlling
properties for the default transformation.
I see this tool as a way of making uncooperative applications cooperate.
There are a series of data transformation tools available on different
platforms but they count on both applications cooperating in using the
same protocol and quite frankly, that just doesn't happen in the real world.
this all came out of my trying to figure out how to return e-mail
messages back to a remote anti-spam engine. Writing plug-ins for every
e-mail client on the face of the planet just doesn't work. Hell, just
writing plug-ins for Thunderbird is a crap shoot. Outlook is just plain
impossible. So the bright idea was drag the message to an icon and have
the icon act as a data sink redirecting the message to the anti-spam server.
anyway, thanks for the assistance.
---eric
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