[Pythonmac-SIG] Which version to use??

Christopher Barker Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
Wed May 26 18:43:57 CEST 2010


Ronald Oussoren wrote:

> To be honest, I'm far from impressed by the quality of the wxWidgets
> port to the Mac. I've run into numerous issues in the past where API
> calls worked just fine on Windows but failed to work on OSX. That
> isn't very helpfull when you want to do the groundwork of a Windows
> app using wxWidgets on OSX and do as little as possible on an actual
> windows machine.

Being a wx fan, I thought I'd comment. Ronald is absolutely correct -- 
there are platform differences -- there is no substitute for testing 
early and often on all the platforms you want to support. I've found 
that while it's fairly common for s given piece of code to work on one 
platform, but not another, I can usually find a way to write it that 
works everywhere -- and that's usually the documented "proper" way. i.e. 
you can get away with different errors on the different platforms.

However, while not perfect, what are the alternatives?

If you only want to support the Mac, then by all means use PyObjC -- 
that will give you a fully native application, but it is not an option 
if you want to support other platforms.

pyQT, pyGTK, and tkInter are the other options -- each has its fans, but 
none of them produce native looking and feeling apps on OS-X. wx wraps 
the native libs (Carbon for now, but the next version is Cocoa), so it's 
possible to have truly native Mac apps with wx, that are also native on 
Windows and *nix (of you call GTK native). Note that I say possible, 
because there are lot of details about how you design the apps t make 
them look and feel "right" on the Mac -- if you neglect those, it won't 
be quite right.

I suppose if you tweak a QT app enough, it might look native, but wx 
does a much better job out of the box.


The other option, of course, is to write multiple GUIs -- my experience 
is that it takes a LOT of code to write a GUI -- so that's a lot of work!

-Chris



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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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