GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Kevin Walzer]

On 6/18/10 6:16 PM, Jeff Hobbs wrote:

>>
>> Is there a good web-site / tutorial / book / etc that you would
>> recommend for getting a good handle on Tk 8.5?
>
> Most of the Tk 8.5 references will be Tcl-based, but one that is cross-
> language is Mark Roseman's www.tkdocs.com.
>
> For books, there is John Ousterhout's main book, now in the 2nd
> edition, updated with Tcl/Tk 8.5 references:
>    http://www.amazon.com/Tcl-Toolkit-2nd-John-Ousterhout/dp/032133633X
>
> To understand just the changes in Tk 8.5, you can see the wiki page
> that lists references for all changes:
>    http://wiki.tcl.tk/10630
>
> It includes 16 new widgets (many themed versions of classic widgets,
> but key new ones like the combobox and notebook), new canvas and text
> features, and more.  The wiki in general has lots of how-to reference
> info (over 20K pages of content).
>
> The key with Tk that I've seen misunderstood in this thread is that it
> has lots of extensions.  Those in the core community do argue about
> whether "important" widgets should be full core or kept as widgets
> (where they get their own dev cycle).  There are some fantastic Tk
> widgets out there, like tktreectrl (http://
> tktreectrl.sourceforge.net/), tktable, many in tklib (e.g. tablelist
> http://www.nemethi.de/tablelist/tablelist.html), and more.  They can
> be used with any of the languages that integrate with Tk, but may not
> have "built-in" support (IOW, you might need some language-specific
> shim).  Overcoming these hurdles may help reduce the pain and glum
> feelings people have towards Tk bound to non-Tcl languages (and is
> indeed one of the points addressed by Tkx).  It doesn't help with doc
> translation (for use with other languages), so that's yet another
> hurdle.  :-/
>
> Jeff

To see the new ttk widgets at work in Tkinter, look at the next 
generation of the venerable app PySol, PySolFC, at 
http://pysolfc.sourceforge.net. Here are screenshots of (I think) the 
Windows versions:

http://pysolfc.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

And the Mac version:

http://mac.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/PySolFC-Screenshot-24708.html

Here's a screenshot from one of my own Tkinter applications that makes 
use of ttk widgets and also such Tk extension packages as BWidgets (the 
treeview) and tablelist (the table view):

http://www.codebykevin.com/phynchronicity-running.png

--Kevin


-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com