Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[rantingrick]

On Jan 16, 5:14 pm, Terry Reedy <tjre... at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 1/16/2011 1:27 PM, rantingrick wrote:
>
> > least look at the awesome screen shots here...
>
> >      http://www.wxpython.org/screenshots.php
>
> I did. Well, they say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!". To me,
> these are mostly awesomely ugly, ugly, ugly. Shot 1: Ugly gray field
> followed by shot2: ugly black on gray. These first two examples look
> like Windows 95/8 -- ie, 20th century look, not 21st.

Now hold on Terry because you are overreacting just a bit here. If you
remember i had requested that everyone download the beautiful demo and
only look at the screen shots as a last resort. It seems you went to
the screenshots page and went home in a huff. However let's
investigate the screen shots with a little more clarity shall we?

#########
# Shot1 #
#########
 This shot shows the most minimal wx GUI, that is, a simple Toplevel
window and nothing more. And if you took the time to read the captions
above that said... "Here is a screen shot of the "minimal" wxPython
application:"... and the screenshot below that said... "Okay, so it is
very minimal, but it is small enough that the source should be
understandable without somebody holding your hand... Take a peek."...
you probably would not have jumped to such bombastic conclusions.

##########
# Shot 2 #
##########
 This shot merely builds on shot one. Nothing fancy. They were not
trying to woo you with the most fancy GUI coding available from shot
one (psst: THAT IS WHAT THE DEMO IS FOR!). You must remember that
screen shots are for inquisitive and possible future users. If you
continue to follow along with the shots you'll see the complexity
increase with each shot. It seems to me that "easy intoduction" was
the focus of the screenshots not "selfish vanity" (psst: THAT IS WHAT
THE DEMO IS FOR!)

> Based on this page, wxwidgets would be a regression from tk.

Yes one might come to that conclusion if they are as shallow as you
seem to be behaving Terry. However i urge you to download the wxPython
demo and then give me an honest opinion. but only AFTER you have spent
at least one hour familiarizing yourself with all the feature richness
of this great GUI library. Heck each widget has an overview page, a
source code page, and a demo page all wrapped up into a nice GUI. No
GUI in the world is this user friendly! Geesh!

> Current
> tkinter on Windows looks like it use native Windows windows. IDLE on
> WinXP looks like a WinXP app; on Windows 7 it looks like a Windows 7
> app. If wxwidgets/wxpython does the same, this page hides it very well.
> And this is apparently an update from 'the old Screen shots' page.

I'll agree this screenshots page needs an update. However (like me)
the wxPython folks probably put more time into the demo and thought
that most people would at least download it before jumping to
conclusions about the screenshots without sufficient data. Oh, did i
give you the demo link. No? Well here it is again...

    http://www.wxpython.org/download.php#stable

> The above is based on presented looks. I have no idea whether, to what
> extent, and how easily one could duplicate the layout and performance of
> the examples with tk.

Tkinter and all of TclTk cannot hold a matchstick to WxPython in
feature richness. Anyone who says otherwise is ill-informed!

> There are, however, other problems with wx that I
> have and will point out in other posts.

Please elaborate, these are free and open forums as far as know...?