[Pythonmac-SIG] wxPython, tkinter & other GUIs

[Chris]

Chris Barker wrote:

>
> How good is JAVA and SWING at creating a native look and feel app on
the
> Mac?
>

The demos that I have run look pretty close to the mac look-and-feel.

>
>
> It really isn't Windows-centric. It is cross platform-centric.
However,
> each individual platform is only as good as the develpment it gets,
and
> the Mac certainly has less interest, and so it is not as well
developed.
> Also, if a Mac develper where to use wxWindows to develope on the Mac,

> and then re-compile to for Windows and GTK, they would probably end up

> eith an app that looked more native on the Mac. A lot of that is a
> matter of design, rather than the toolkit.
>

Since you mention GTK, why not use GTK as a gui? GTK exists for Windows
and
Linux. There is an alpha version ported to the Mac on Sourceforge. The
demo on
Sourceforge is pretty slick. There is even a GTK gui builder as part of
the
LinuxPPC distibution.

> Exactly, if you want JAVA GUI, why not use Jython? Besides no Numeric
> :-(
>
> I'll keep looking for a nice Mac-ish app built with wx, I think we
> really need a demo.
>
> -Chris
>

There are good reasons why to use Java as a gui as part of Python
instead of
just Jython. Jython has a number of limitations that make it awkward to
use and
distribute. First, point and click operation does not work well with
Jython. On
MacPython, I can just double click on a script and it will run. With
Python in
Linux, I just type python with the script name and it will run. It does
not seem
to be as simple with Jython, possibly due to the fact that you are
running an
interpreter inside an interpreter. Jython on the Mac also seems slow.
Python
also seems to be more widely distributed than Jython. There needs to be
more
than cross platform compatibility, you need the interpreter to be on
many
machines. Finally, much of the other guis and potential guis (like tk,
wx, fltk,
GTK, etc) are either buggy, don't exist on the Mac or are in the very
early
stages of development.

Regarding wx, there was talk over a year ago that wxPython was being
ported to
the Mac. So far it has not happened, or at least there is no usable
binary yet.
If you are waiting for wx, you might be waiting a long time.

Chris L.