[Pythonmac-SIG] What's MacPython missing?

[Bob Ippolito]

I'm interested to know what people here would like to see for MacPython.
	Which modules from other platforms would you really like to see?
	Which Apple APIs/Frameworks would you like to use but aren't wrapped 
or aren't wrapped satisfactorily?
	What documentation do you think needs to be written/improved 
(specifically)?

These are a few of the things I'm interested in:
	Easy to use ARB_VERTEX_PROGRAM support for PyOpenGL (something like a 
hybrid of ShaderBuilder and DrawBot)
		A numarray-esque syntax -> ARB_VERTEX_PROGRAM compiler (Cg *still* 
isn't available for the Mac, and ATI's RenderMonkey is DirectX)
	
	An optimized PPC backend for Psyco (I'm kind of working on this on and 
off.. at the PPC ASM compiler/decompiler stage)
	
	Better CoreAudio/AudioUnits support, here are some interesting 
projects I've seen:
		http://arrowtheory.com/software/hypersonic/index.html
		http://www.icculus.org/al_osx/ (Highly optimized partial OpenAL 
implementation)
		http://www.stolk.info/alpy/ (this is a GPL binding for OpenAL.. 
probably a poor license choice)
	
	Better use of AltiVec in numarray (especially vec_perm stuff.. very 
useful for byteswapped arrays and converting bitmaps)
	
	Some crazy bridge that lets you write Contextual Menu PlugIns in 
Python (eww, COM.. this might be a job for ctypes and an embedded 
Python?)
	
	A better PackageManager / distutils
	
	Fully functional SciPy / VTK / MayaVi
	
	PyQt for Qt/Mac
	
	A relatively bug free version of wxPython that's not noticeably slow ;)
	
	Stackless on Python 2.3 (I know, this doesn't really have anything to 
do specifically with MacPython, but it would be more useful to us if it 
was on the Python 2.3 codebase)
	
	A version of PIL (or something like it) that's updated for Python 2.2+ 
features and uses a more sensible storage mechanism (i.e. something 
that isn't hardcoded to do RGB/RGBX/RGBA only).  I think leveraging the 
SDL libraries would be good for this, as they can deal with all kinds 
of bitmaps (arbitrary bit shifts for channels).  I'd like to see the 
storage used actually be addressable directly as a numarray (pygame 
sort of does this, but not quite adequately).
	
	Would be nice of Apple open sourced the SWIG wrapper for CoreGraphics 
they wrote (included with vendor installed Python in MacOS X 10.3), the 
bgen wrapper is missing a LOT of useful stuff from there.

	A smarter version of bgen or something bgen-like that was more generic 
about the kind of C it could understand, and more modern about the 
wrappers it spit out (keyword arguments, new style types with 
initializers, etc).  Potentially it could even preserve documentation 
from the original code, it would be relatively straightforward to do 
that with most (new?) Apple headers.  Maybe even a version that spit 
out ctypes wrappers instead.

-bob