[Tkinter-discuss] active icons with drag-and-drop

[Eric S. Johansson]

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