[Pythonmac-SIG] Interesting Open Source Project: Cocoa Dialog

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 14, 2006, at 9:09 PM, Daniel Lord wrote:

> (Unless of course its been mentioned here before and then in the
> words of SNL's immortal Emily Latella: "Never mind!")

I think something like it was mentioned a few years ago, but there  
haven't been any recent discussions about this particular application  
or the topic in general.

> CocoaDialog seems to fill that gap between the command-line and
> PyObjC providing a 'quick and dirty' GUI interface for scripts
> (Python. Perl. Shell, Ruby, etc.)
> I just found it while 'googling up'  up some AppKit NSTextContainer
> subtleties I was having trouble figuring out and I thought I'd pass
> it along. How Google put those two together I'll never know ;-)

One thing to note: CocoaDialog is GPL.  This is probably OK for most  
contexts since you just communicate with it via pipes, but it  
certainly means that it'd never be a standard feature of either OS X  
or MacPython.

> Clearly it doesn't replace PyObjC's power and breadth, but it might
> have a place in the toolbox for smaller projects. Kind of a Growl/
> Display Dialog artifice.
>
> http://cocoadialog.sourceforge.net/documentation.html

There's no reason why PyObjC couldn't ship with a library that had a  
set of "Easy Dialogs" to use from more CLI-oriented apps.  It'd be a  
good project for someone who cares.  I'd recommend simply re- 
implementing the old EasyDialogs API in PyObjC, and then extending it  
to support more modern features of OS X.

-bob