[Pythonmac-SIG] W Widget Tutorial and Reference

[Corran Webster]

Hi all,
    following Jack's request for documentation, and some earlier comments I
made about the ease of working with widgets interactively in the IDE, I
decided to go through and write a tutorial/HOWTO and reference manual for
the "W widgets" used in the IDE.

It's reached the point where the tutorial is largely complete - it could do
with more examples of complete applications, but it's otherwise fairly
comprehensive.  The reference still has a couple of areas which need more
work (the Wapplication.application class being the main one), but I think
it's at least useful now.

Given this, I thought it would be a good idea to make it available, and to
solicit comments (particularly from Just, since I may have misinterpreted
the purpose of some features).  You can find it at:

http://www.nevada.edu/~cwebster/Python/WWidgets/

There are likely errors, however, possibly even major ones, as there are
parts of the W Widget interface which I have just read, and not directly
tested.

Once any errors or ommissions have been fixed, I'll see what can be done
about announcing it more widely (presumably c.l.py.announce and the
documentation pages at www.python.org would be the logical places).

In the longer run, I'd like to see the W widgets become more widely used -
at the moment, given the shakiness of Tkinter, they're the easiest way into
GUI programming on the mac, which is an important thing.  I could see the
usefulness of a "widget repository" where people can contribute extensions
to the base widget set (like syntax-colouring PyEditors or Appearance
Manager control widgets), and I'd be willing to host something like this if
there is interest (at least within the constraints of my quota).


On a slightly related note, there has been discussion of the new "Vaults of
Parnassus" guide to Python resources (http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/) on
c.l.py; but I notice that there is nothing there for the Mac.  It'd
probably be a good idea to submit Jack's Mac Python page there, at the very
least (I know it's not hard to find from www.python.org, but it can't
hurt); and it might be a good idea for other folks who have Mac Python
related stuff to submit things also.


Corran