[Pythonmac-SIG] NewBie question: Building GUI for Mac

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

Am 2008-06-06 um 16:33 schrieb Kevin Walzer:
> 2. wxPython is cross-platform but looks great on the Mac with some  
> attention to UI design, is well-documented (both in terms of  
> available sample code online and books), and has a supportive  
> community. It doesn't provide many Mac-specific hooks like PyObjC  
> does, but it's quite sufficient for a nice application. One possible  
> drawback to wxPython is that it runs on top of the Carbon  
> frameworks, which are now deprecated on the Mac and will probably go  
> away in the next several years. The plan to port wxPython to use  
> Cocoa is somewhat hazy at this moment--wxWidget's Mac maintainer  
> says he is implementing things gradually.

I'd suggest to use dabo (as Ed suggested), its GUI part is a "more  
pythonic" wxPython wrapper (for now - there are plans to wrap also  
Tkinter and Qt, but nobody's working at that).
dabo is a three layer framework actually, but you don't need to use  
the database stuff.
Unfortunately a lot of useful functionality is still mostly  
undocumented.

> 4. Tkinter comes with Python, and is easier to learn than the other  
> toolkits. Basic Tkinter is well-documented and has a supportive  
> community around it. The drawback is that it is a more spartan  
> toolkit out of the box, and you have to work with a lot of extension  
> packages to get a more sophisticated GUI. I use Tkinter as my  
> toolkit and have not found a compelling reason to switch, but I've  
> also done a lot of work on assembling a set of libraries that give  
> the UI of my Python program the polish that Mac users demand. Like  
> wxPython and PyQt, Tkinter doesn't offer a lot of Mac-specific  
> hooks, and it also runs on Carbon. The plan to port Tkinter to Cocoa  
> is also somewhat hazy at this point; a developer says he's working  
> on it, but no releases or even much public discussion of his  
> progress have been posted.

In my experience Tkinter is much slower than wxPython.

> Growl has Python bindings, and can also be called from the command- 
> line via AppleScript.

Growl is very easy to use from Python, I do it all the time (and thus  
spreading Growl in our company).
If you'd like to stay multi-platform, there's something similar ...
for Windows: Snarl http://www.fullphat.net/
for Gnome: Mumbles http://www.mumbles-project.org/


Greetlings from Lake Constance!
Hraban
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