[Pythonmac-SIG] Bob Ippolito's synopsis of Python(s) on OS X

[Kevin Ollivier]

Hi all,

On Mar 30, 2004, at 1:56 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

> On Mar 30, 2004, at 4:40 PM, Nick Bastin wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mar 30, 2004, at 4:29 PM, Tom Loredo wrote:
>>
>>> This post is for a dual purpose:  first, to alert newcomers to
>>> MacPython that Bob Ippolito's PyCon2004 presentation is a great
>>> summary of the potentially confusing Python situation under OS X;
>>> and second, to publicly thank Bob for taking the time to put
>>> together so nice a presentation.  I've been using Python on the
>>> Mac for years, and I still learned a lot from his presentation.
>>>
>>> It's available online here:
>>>
>>> http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/32/
>>
>> I would just like to point out that slide 60 is *NOT* a 
>> representative sample of wxPython on MacOS X.  Unless he got 
>> extremely unlucky, Bob went out of his way to find an example that 
>> did not look good on MacOS X.  It's ok to like your toolkit better 
>> than some other toolkit, but don't make the others appear worse than 
>> they really are.  The wxPython demo application isn't even on the 
>> whole a particularly good example (unfortunately) since a few 
>> examples are poorly coded as far as layout goes (I can make controls 
>> overlap with cocoa too), but if you go through it, you'll get a much 
>> better idea of where wx works and doesn't work.
>
> Yes, I did intentionally put wxPython, pyQt, and Tkinter in a bad 
> light, I wanted to make it absolutely clear that they are not quite 
> there yet.  I agree with Guido when he said that wxPython is the best 
> among certain constraints in his PyCon keynote, but I personally would 
> prefer and currently recommend to develop a separate Cocoa front-end 
> altogether for most applications because the cross-platform GUI 
> frameworks have significant bugs *AND* because you can and should take 
> advantage of platform-specific features such as WebKit, AddressBook, 
> etc. for many Mac applications.

Well, although I agree with another poster that Bob's taking this 
approach would distance some people from even considering Mac 
development, my main purpose of writing this note is that we are 
quickly working to resolve many of these issues on the wxPython front.

By summer, many of those graphics glitches you have seen will be gone, 
WebKit will most certainly be available, support for catching the basic 
AppleEvents (i.e. like Open) is now enabled, and quite possibly the 
DataBrowser will be more or less completely supported and utilized as 
the underlying control for both ListCtrls and TreeCtrls. Also, our 
latest CVS supports the "Brushed Metal" look, and also controls now 
also let you specify normal/small/mini size variants for a control. And 
that's just a summary, not a complete list. =)

So let me assure folks, we are *not* taking these issues lying down. ;-)

Thanks,

Kevin