[Pythonmac-SIG] Mac User Python Newbies

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 14, 2005, at 1:02 PM, Chris Barker wrote:

> Roger Binns wrote:
>> My wxPython code is hand coded.  I haven't found any of the design
>> tools to be much good for non-trivial projects.  For example try
>> doing something like the wxPython demo with one of them.  They
>> also don't work well if you have custom widgets, which is a lot of my 
>> UI.
>
> This brings up a really good point about GUI GUI Builders: They tend 
> to discourage the use of custom widgets, which is a really a bad 
> thing. That's why I don't use them. Maybe someone will developer one 
> that works really well with custom widgets some day... I'm guessing 
> that would be a tool specifically developed for, and written in, 
> python. That way you could easily add your custom widget to the 
> "pallet" of available widgets, and it could be a first class citizen.

Cocoa and Interface Builder get this right.  In IB, there's a "Custom 
Class" tab in the info window when you're inspecting an instance of 
something, and you can choose any subclass.  If you want to expose 
additional configuration features or a nice display for this widget, 
you can implement that in an Interface Builder palette.

Of course, this is only really useful for Mac OS X specific 
development, but I would definitely recommend that developers of tools 
for other frameworks look to Cocoa for inspiration.  It's extremely 
mature and flexible.

-bob