[Pythonmac-SIG] Carbon GUI/MacPython

Jack Jansen Jack.Jansen at cwi.nl
Mon Aug 16 00:44:59 CEST 2004


On 13 Aug 2004, at 05:24, Kevin Walzer wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> I'm curious as to why the Carbon side of MacPython doesn't seem to be
> updated, at least with regard to GUI programming. Earlier, when I
> queried the list about the W widget set and some related questions, I
> was advised that these were deprecated and would likely go away at some
> point in the future. It was also mentioned that MacPython (the 
> PythonIDE
> and PackageManager) are dependent on the Waste module, which also seems
> obsolete.
>
> My question is, what's going to replace these things? The Carbon API 
> has
> more modern text processing facilities than Waste (MLTE?), if I have
> read the documentation correctly, and one can certainly also call the
> complete set of Interface Builder widgets from Carbon. Or is PyObjC
> going to become the "official" Mac-native API for Python at some point
> in the future--the only way to write Python software that takes full
> advantage of Mac API's?

In addition to what Bob and Kevin O said let me add a couple of random 
thoughts. The reason for no work being done on Carbon is purely lack of 
time. I am keeping the lowlevel stuff up to date (anything in the 
Carbon package) but  the modules above that (Framework and the W 
family) would take too much time. But if you want to tackle that: by 
all means, be my guest! Converting Framework to use Carbon Events 
(lowlevel APIs are available in Carbon.CarbonEvt) is probably a first 
step. Then replacing Waste with MLTE (also available) in W, but that 
may turn out to be more difficult because in some respects Waste is 
more powerful than MLTE. The final step is getting a modern look and 
feel, and that's in one way the most difficult step (W does a lot of 
work to try and make things look pretty and consistent, which worked 
fine under MacOS 7.5 but broke with MacOS 8) but in other ways it may 
be easy (after all you'll mainly be ripping out code).
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen at cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman



More information about the Pythonmac-SIG mailing list