questions from a lost sheep

[Chris Mellon]

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Joe Strout <joe at strout.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I used to by a big Python fan, many years ago [1].  I stopped using it after
> discovering REALbasic, because my main developmental need is to write
> desktop applications that are as native as possible on each platform, and
> because I really like a strongly-typed language with a good IDE.  At the
> time (circa 2000), Python just didn't cut the mustard in this regard.
>  (Indeed, none of the standard cross-platform C libraries -- Tk, QT,
> wxWidgets -- worked worth a darn on the Mac, at least at that time.)
>
> But REALbasic is a commercial, closed-source project with a small
> development team, and I find myself consistently frustrated by quality
> issues (read "bugs").  I've started to think fondly of the rock-solid
> stability of Python, and have been wondering if perhaps aggressive unit
> testing could mitigate most of the problems of weak typing.
>
> But that still leaves the other issue: creating high-quality desktop apps
> that look and feel just as good to users as anything written in the
> "standard" tools for each platform (Cocoa, .NET, etc.).  REALbasic still
> does a great job of that (when it works at all).  What's the state of the
> art in desktop app development in Python these days?
>
> Also, apart from simply searching with Google, is there anyplace I could go
> to find a good Python contractor to build a cross-platform desktop app demo?
>
> Many thanks,
> - Joe

wxPython and Qts Mac support are leaps and bounds ahead of what they
were in 2000, I would strongly suggest giving them another look.

I know several that people in the wx community do contract work (or
even just in bounties, if there are toolkit issues you'd like solved),
take a look at wxwidgets.org for that.

There's also the Python job board at python.org.