anygui-devel — Discussions about the development of the Anygui package

Re: [Anygui-devel] how to open a file using tkinter

[Laura C. <la...@op...>]

This is the wrong mailinglist for this question.  pyt...@py...
is where you can get much better help for Tkinter if you have any
more questions.

However, I think I know what you are looking for, assuming what you
mean is that you want to open a document in a similar fashion to the
way that open office does it.

see
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/438123

If, on the other hand, you actually want to open up an oowriter
int he middle of your tkinter program, well, that's a much harder
question and I don't know how to do that.  Try asking python-list.

good luck,
Laura Creighton


In a message of Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:02:11 +0530, "brindly sujith" writes:
>--===============1735878721==
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>------=_Part_36778_19608028.1199777531348
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>Content-Disposition: inline
>
>hi
>i am using TKINTER to create GUI application
>
>i want to know how to open a word document in open office or any other
>application
>
>please send me the tkinter coding for this
>
>------=_Part_36778_19608028.1199777531348
>Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>Content-Disposition: inline
>
>hi<br>i am using TKINTER to create GUI application<br><br>i want to know 
>how to open a word document in open office or any other application<br><b
>r>please send me the tkinter coding for this<br>
>
>------=_Part_36778_19608028.1199777531348--
>
>
>--===============1735878721==
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>Content-Disposition: inline
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace.
>It's the best place to buy or sell services for
>just about anything Open Source.
>http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketpl
>ace
>--===============1735878721==--

[Anygui-devel] how to open a file using tkinter

[brindly s. <br...@gm...>]

hi
i am using TKINTER to create GUI application

i want to know how to open a word document in open office or any other
application

please send me the tkinter coding for this

[Anygui-devel] =?ISO-8859-1?Q??=

[Petre D. <pd...@gm...>]

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 08:15:38 +0300, Greg Ewing <gre...@ca...>
wrote:
 
Peter Damoc wrote:
 
If the feel is implemented using the best approach (think OSX) users on 
other systems won't mind.
 
The notion of "best" is observer-dependent.
 
True, but good apps tend to get accepted. For example I was a Winamp
evangelist  and seeing iTunes with its huge 
download size and huge memory consuption I was a little put off BUT after
using iTunes a little bit I got hooked, now I'm 
a iTunes adept. The quality of the app got me in spite of its shortcomings.
 
I don't think it's a matter of "best", anyway, but of things
behaving consistently with other applications on the platform.
If the user is accustomed to certain menu items being in
certain places or having certain key equivalents, for
example, it's annoying when some applications do things
differently.
 
True again BUT people are able to learn and when they see their time valued
by the app, they tend to use it, even if they 
might have to learn a few new tricks along the way.
 
I think appearance is important to many people, too. Mac
users in particular tend to be unimpressed by apps which
look un-Mac-like. It gives an impression of shoddiness,
of having been ported from somewhere else in a quick and
dirty way, which doesn't help to engender a feeling of
trust in it.
 
Appearance can be pluggable, QT proved possible and apps don't have to be
100% accurate, if they look close enough to what 
they should look on that platform, people don't notice the missing bits.
 
Maybe Windows users are less discerning, I don't know.
But I wouldn't like to foist an Aqua-looking app on a
Windows user. If I'm to ask that Mac apps look Mac-like,
I feel I owe them the same courtesy.
 
Windows users are used to multi look and feel desktops, either due to the
whole win2k apps on WinXP or due to big players 
like Yahoo not playing by the rules.
 
Although if Longhorn turns out to rip off Aqua closely
enough, maybe this will cease to be an issue... 
 
 
 one can always hope! 
 
Peter.

-- 
Lust, ein paar Euro nebenbei zu verdienen? Ohne Kosten, ohne Risiko!
Satte Provisionen für GMX Partner: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/partner

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Greg E. <gre...@ca...>]

Peter Damoc wrote:

> If the feel is implemented using the best approach (think OSX) users on  
> other systems won't mind.

The notion of "best" is observer-dependent.

I don't think it's a matter of "best", anyway, but of things
behaving consistently with other applications on the platform.
If the user is accustomed to certain menu items being in
certain places or having certain key equivalents, for
example, it's annoying when some applications do things
differently.

I think appearance is important to many people, too. Mac
users in particular tend to be unimpressed by apps which
look un-Mac-like. It gives an impression of shoddiness,
of having been ported from somewhere else in a quick and
dirty way, which doesn't help to engender a feeling of
trust in it.

Maybe Windows users are less discerning, I don't know.
But I wouldn't like to foist an Aqua-looking app on a
Windows user. If I'm to ask that Mac apps look Mac-like,
I feel I owe them the same courtesy.

Although if Longhorn turns out to rip off Aqua closely
enough, maybe this will cease to be an issue... :-)

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc.  |
gre...@ca...	   +--------------------------------------+

Re: [Anygui-devel] layout standard or specification

[Magnus L. H. <ma...@he...>]

Donnal Walter <don...@ya...>:
> 
[snip]
> 
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/layout.html
> 
> but this is not really a public "standard". I would even be willing
> to look at "proprietary" standards as long as they are published
> and widely recognized.

In that case it would seem that XUL would fit the bill...? Isn't it an
open and widely recognized standard? Maybe not as in "this is what you
must do to do layout" but as in "this is one of the de facto standards
when specifying layout in a data file" (as opposed to using a
programming language API).

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland                    Fall seven times, stand up eight
http://hetland.org                                  [Japanese proverb]

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Peter D. <pd...@gm...>]

On Mon, 08 Aug 2005 13:41:12 +0300, Magnus Lie Hetland  
<ma...@he...> wrote:

> Peter Damoc <pd...@gm...>:
>>
> [snip]
>> I'm for the QT like approach NOT the wxWidgets one.
>
> So this would be like Java Swing? (Just checking.)

hmm... I don't know all that much about Swing but I think it will differ  
 from their approach. :)
IIRC Swing draws the interface elements using Java code. I'm more for  
moving all the low level drawing to an optimised C/C++ renderer.

> [snip]
>> This is in my view the best approach: Implement as much as possible
>> in python and reuse some of the code from  one of those projects
>> altho it might not be all that easy to "extract" the  necessary bits
>> from their source tree.
>
> Sounds like a sound enough approach, I guess.
>
>> The idea is to forgo all the unnecessary, C++ related bits from the
>> toolkit that have counterparts in python and keep only the minimum.
>
> IIRC, one of your questions was what you could reuse from Anygui?
>
> To begin with, I guess you could simply write a back-end using your
> approach -- but many of the Anygui mechanisms would be highly
> unnecessary (i.e., the whole front-end/back-end stuff). The event
> handling stuff could perhaps be useful, and maybe some of the
> model/observable stuff...
>

I'll look at them.

Peter.

[Anygui-devel] layout standard or specification

[Donnal W. <don...@ya...>]

Every GUI toolkit I have looked at has its own system / notation
for managing layouts (resizing, alignment, margins and so on). Is
there any kind of public standard for application GUI layout,
similar to say the W3 CSS standards for web documents (box
properties, block elements, etc). The closest thing I have been
able to find so far is XUL:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/layout.html

but this is not really a public "standard". I would even be willing
to look at "proprietary" standards as long as they are published
and widely recognized.

Regards,
Donnal Walter

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Magnus L. H. <ma...@he...>]

Peter Damoc <pd...@gm...>:
>
[snip]
> I'm for the QT like approach NOT the wxWidgets one.

So this would be like Java Swing? (Just checking.)

[snip]
> This is in my view the best approach: Implement as much as possible
> in python and reuse some of the code from  one of those projects
> altho it might not be all that easy to "extract" the  necessary bits
> from their source tree.

Sounds like a sound enough approach, I guess.

> The idea is to forgo all the unnecessary, C++ related bits from the
> toolkit that have counterparts in python and keep only the minimum.

IIRC, one of your questions was what you could reuse from Anygui?

To begin with, I guess you could simply write a back-end using your
approach -- but many of the Anygui mechanisms would be highly
unnecessary (i.e., the whole front-end/back-end stuff). The event
handling stuff could perhaps be useful, and maybe some of the
model/observable stuff...

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland                    Fall seven times, stand up eight
http://hetland.org                                  [Japanese proverb]

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Peter D. <pd...@gm...>]

On Sat, 06 Aug 2005 05:00:04 +0300, Greg Ewing  
<gre...@ca...> wrote:

> Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:
>
>> One option to look out for in the future is Greg's PyGUI:
>>    http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python_gui
>
> Peter seems to be suggesting more or less implementing a
> complete GUI in Python. That would ensure that it worked
> on all platforms, but there are difficulties with this
> approach, which is what things like wxWidgets and Qt do.
> They never seem to look and behave exactly like the
> native widgets on a given platform, and they're always
> playing catch-up with changes in the native look and feel.

Yes! this is what I'm suggesting more or less.
I'm for the QT like approach NOT the wxWidgets one.
If the theming engine is well implemented, the toolkit will look very much  
alike the native ones.
If the feel is implemented using the best approach (think OSX) users on  
other systems won't mind. I mean... if the apps behave better people won't  
mind that they don't behave like the native ones.

> I also have performance concerns about doing it all in
> Python. I expect it would be very difficult, for example,
> to implement a pure-Python rich text editor that was
> as featureful and efficient as those available nowadays
> in many of the native GUI packages.

I agree, some widgets would simply have to be implemented in some low  
level language BUT if they first work people might find it worth  
reimplementing them in C/C++ or at least the bottleneck bits. Kinda like  
in pickle/cPickle combo.

> With PyGUI, I'm taking almost the opposite approach,
> and trying to make as much use as I can of what is
> natively provided on the plaform. Like Anygui, PyGUI
> aims to provide a common API to the Python programmer,
> implemented in terms of different underlying libraries.
> But unlike Anygui, I'm not trying to wrap every GUI
> toolkit in existence, but just provide *one* high-quality
> implementation on each platform, built as directly as
> possible on the platform's native facilities.
>
> That way, I hope to avoid the worst of the lowest-common-
> denominator problems that Anygui has, leverage as much
> power as I can from the underlying platform facilities,
> and avoid requiring the user to install any large,
> unwieldy and potentially buggy third-party libraries.

FOX and I think FLTK have the best approach... they implement everything  
on top of a very thin platform specific layer.
This is in my view the best approach:
Implement as much as possible in python and reuse some of the code from  
one of those projects altho it might not be all that easy to "extract" the  
necessary bits from their source tree.
The idea is to forgo all the unnecessary, C++ related bits from the  
toolkit that have counterparts in python and keep only the minimum.

Peter

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Magnus L. H. <ma...@he...>]

Peter Damoc <pd...@gm...>:
>
[snip]
> 
> Around 2 Mb (2.14) so the rest is wxPython :)

Wow -- that *is* heavy :)

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland                    Fall seven times, stand up eight
http://hetland.org                                  [Japanese proverb]

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Peter D. <pd...@gm...>]

On Mon, 08 Aug 2005 11:57:56 +0300, Magnus Lie Hetland  
<ma...@he...> wrote:

> Peter Damoc <pd...@gm...>:
>>
> [snip]
>> I am a wxPython user! for the past 18 months I've used nothing else,
>> however it feels "heavy".
>> The simple HelloWorld is around 11-12 Mb when packaged with py2exe.
>
> How big is "print 'Hello, world!'" when you package it with py2exe?
> (Just curious...)
>

Around 2 Mb (2.14) so the rest is wxPython :)

Peter.

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Magnus L. H. <ma...@he...>]

Peter Damoc <pd...@gm...>:
>
[snip]
> I am a wxPython user! for the past 18 months I've used nothing else,  
> however it feels "heavy".
> The simple HelloWorld is around 11-12 Mb when packaged with py2exe.

How big is "print 'Hello, world!'" when you package it with py2exe?
(Just curious...)

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland                    Fall seven times, stand up eight
http://hetland.org                                  [Japanese proverb]

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Peter D. <pd...@gm...>]

On Fri, 05 Aug 2005 17:41:27 +0300, Magnus Lie Hetland  
<ma...@he...> wrote:

> Peter Damoc <pd...@gm...>:
[snip]
>> As a programmer I would like to have is an OSS python GUI toolkit
>> that  looks great everywhere and acts the same on all platforms
>> without custom  hack in the app code.
>
> I agree. Nowadays I think wxPython and PyQt seem like promising
> candidates, actually.

wxPython rocks! it is the best OSS has to offer right now (personal  
opinion)

> One option to look out for in the future is Greg's PyGUI:
>
>   http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python_gui

I will take another look at this. :)

> [snip]
>> Now to the real question of this email.
>> What should a crazy enough person do to try and build such a
>> toolkit? How could he reuse the work that went into AnyGUI?
>
> Hm. Much of the code (and blood, sweat and tears) of Anygui deals with
> the front-end/back-end stuff -- and if you want to implement the
> actual GUI stuff yourself, I guess you could just scrap all that. If
> you want to keep this mechanism, you could probably build on what's
> there...
>
> But if you don't want a pure-Python layer that sits on top of other
> packages (not sure if you do or not ;) -- why not simply use a
> packages such as wxPython? It seems to have the BDFLs blessing, so...
>

I am a wxPython user! for the past 18 months I've used nothing else,  
however it feels "heavy".
The simple HelloWorld is around 11-12 Mb when packaged with py2exe.

Peter.

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[David M. <da...@re...>]

Peter Damoc wrote:
> Does Tkinter supports skins? Simply changing the bgcolour or the font
> don't cut it... it still looks ugly by todays standards.

Sorry, Tkinter doesn't support skins, or alpha-blending, or animated 3d
dancing animals either.

Choice of gui widgets is akin to religious debate, so I won't engage
here. All I'll say is that for me, Tkinter (with PMW) gives me the
fastest way to implement a basic clean-looking multiplatform GUI, on a
par with Thunderbird or Firefox, with a programming API that lets me
implement the desired appearance and functionality with less effort,
less lines of code and less platform-specific dramas than the other GUI
libs I've looked at.

Cheers
David

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Peter D. <pd...@gm...>]

On Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:13:38 +0300, David McNab <da...@re...>  
wrote:

> Peter Damoc wrote:
>>>> There is currently no such thing
>>> True, but (IMHO) the PMW/Tkinter combination comes very close
>>> (http://pmw.sourceforge.net).
>
>> anything Tkinter makes me thing at ugly GUIs
>
> That's because most tk gui authors don't take the time to style their
> interfaces.
>
> Agreed - default tkinter looks horrible. For instance, the default grey
> background and bold text for fields - a graphic design abortion!
>
> The beauty of Tkinter is that it's accessed through python classes. So
> all you have to do is write a subclass once for each of the widget
> classes you use, and all the ugliness goes away.
>
> D

Does Tkinter supports skins? Simply changing the bgcolour or the font
don't cut it... it still looks ugly by todays standards.

Peter.

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Greg E. <gre...@ca...>]

Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:

> One option to look out for in the future is Greg's PyGUI:
> 
>   http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python_gui

Peter seems to be suggesting more or less implementing a
complete GUI in Python. That would ensure that it worked
on all platforms, but there are difficulties with this
approach, which is what things like wxWidgets and Qt do.
They never seem to look and behave exactly like the
native widgets on a given platform, and they're always
playing catch-up with changes in the native look and feel.

I also have performance concerns about doing it all in
Python. I expect it would be very difficult, for example,
to implement a pure-Python rich text editor that was
as featureful and efficient as those available nowadays
in many of the native GUI packages.

With PyGUI, I'm taking almost the opposite approach,
and trying to make as much use as I can of what is
natively provided on the plaform. Like Anygui, PyGUI
aims to provide a common API to the Python programmer,
implemented in terms of different underlying libraries.
But unlike Anygui, I'm not trying to wrap every GUI
toolkit in existence, but just provide *one* high-quality
implementation on each platform, built as directly as
possible on the platform's native facilities.

That way, I hope to avoid the worst of the lowest-common-
denominator problems that Anygui has, leverage as much
power as I can from the underlying platform facilities,
and avoid requiring the user to install any large,
unwieldy and potentially buggy third-party libraries.

Greg

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Magnus L. H. <ma...@he...>]

Peter Damoc <pd...@gm...>:
>
> On Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:18:28 +0300, David McNab <da...@re...>  
> wrote:
> 
[snip]
> this is why I think is better to just reimplement the low level.
> Wrapping the toolkits might be too much, especialy for a small team

Yeah -- it turned out to be quite hard in practice.

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland                    Fall seven times, stand up eight
http://hetland.org                                  [Japanese proverb]

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Magnus L. H. <ma...@he...>]

Peter Damoc <pd...@gm...>:
>
> Hello list,
> 
[snip]
> AnyGUI tries to unify the API and use existing toolkits BUT in this
> it  opens not one but many cans of worms, not only will the end user
> have to  deal with the quirks of one toolkit but with the quirks of
> many.

The idea was (originally) to keep things at such a low level that the
developer only needed to worry about the general logical structure of
the GUI, and the details would be handled by the back-end. That was
the idea, but... ;)

> As a programmer I would like to have is an OSS python GUI toolkit
> that  looks great everywhere and acts the same on all platforms
> without custom  hack in the app code.

I agree. Nowadays I think wxPython and PyQt seem like promising
candidates, actually.

One option to look out for in the future is Greg's PyGUI:

  http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python_gui

[snip]
> Now to the real question of this email.
> What should a crazy enough person do to try and build such a
> toolkit? How could he reuse the work that went into AnyGUI?

Hm. Much of the code (and blood, sweat and tears) of Anygui deals with
the front-end/back-end stuff -- and if you want to implement the
actual GUI stuff yourself, I guess you could just scrap all that. If
you want to keep this mechanism, you could probably build on what's
there...

But if you don't want a pure-Python layer that sits on top of other
packages (not sure if you do or not ;) -- why not simply use a
packages such as wxPython? It seems to have the BDFLs blessing, so...

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland                    Fall seven times, stand up eight
http://hetland.org                                  [Japanese proverb]

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[David M. <da...@re...>]

Peter Damoc wrote:
>>> There is currently no such thing
>> True, but (IMHO) the PMW/Tkinter combination comes very close
>> (http://pmw.sourceforge.net).

> anything Tkinter makes me thing at ugly GUIs

That's because most tk gui authors don't take the time to style their
interfaces.

Agreed - default tkinter looks horrible. For instance, the default grey
background and bold text for fields - a graphic design abortion!

The beauty of Tkinter is that it's accessed through python classes. So
all you have to do is write a subclass once for each of the widget
classes you use, and all the ugliness goes away.

D

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Peter D. <pd...@gm...>]

On Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:18:28 +0300, David McNab <da...@re...>  
wrote:

> Peter Damoc wrote:
>> Hello list,
>>
>> I've been looking around at python GUI toolkits just for fun and I came
>> across AnyGUI.
>> It is very impressive but I think it solves the wrong problem. Let me
>> explain myself:
> 8><
>
> Agreed - AnyGui by its nature is vulnerable to countless environmental
> quirks. If it had a large, organised and devoted development and
> maintenance team, it would probably cope well. But it would take a lot
> of resources to prevent the endless "it's not working on <linux distro  
> x>"

this is why I think is better to just reimplement the low level. Wrapping  
the toolkits might be too much, especialy for a small team

>> As a programmer I would like to have is an OSS python GUI toolkit that
>> looks great everywhere and acts the same on all platforms without
>> custom  hack in the app code.
>
> PyQT is worth a look. However, that carries the cost of Qt's weird
> windows licensing quirks.

PyQT follows QT and... some people might not want to invest in something  
that will allow the to create *only* GPL OpenSource. Where I live 6000$ is  
about the sallary for 2 years for some people. Not an option.

>> There is currently no such thing
>
> True, but (IMHO) the PMW/Tkinter combination comes very close
> (http://pmw.sourceforge.net).

anything Tkinter makes me thing at ugly GUIs.... sure that might be a  
whimsical thing but.... a lot of beginners look at this.

>> and my little mind cannot understand why.
>> Ok... so its a lot of work to create such a thing
>
> Creating such a thing is relatively straightforward. Making it practical
> - easily learned, easy to setup and use, and respectful of resources
> takes about 5-50 times that amount of work again.

build it and they will come. Once done the proof of concept... maybe  
someone will come and optimize the low-end stuff just to demonstrate that  
it can.

> There's a lot of good gui libs, but they're hard to understand unless
> you're willing to study the implementation's source code, or even live
> with the developer and suck the pizza stains off his/her T-shirt.

Not true, I have a fair experience with wxPython and is not that hard BUT  
it does not allow skinning, and it feels heavy, packaged exe are rather  
big... and most importantly...  a lot of low level bugs surface from the  
C++ part.

> Please do have a serious try of Tkinter, with the PMW classes over the
> top. I've been there, from scared gui neophyte to someone that can build
> smart, platform-independent guis - all the pain and labour you put into
> learning Tkinter, you will recoup in joy and satisfaction as your apps
> Simply Just Work. Tkinter-based progs also package well into windows
> standalone EXE packages (eg Py2EXE), so you can spare your users the
> confusion of installing/setting up their own Python environment.
>
> Cheers
> David

Thanks for your reply, will take a look at PMW.

Peter.

Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[David M. <da...@re...>]

Peter Damoc wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> I've been looking around at python GUI toolkits just for fun and I came 
> across AnyGUI.
> It is very impressive but I think it solves the wrong problem. Let me 
> explain myself:
8><

Agreed - AnyGui by its nature is vulnerable to countless environmental
quirks. If it had a large, organised and devoted development and
maintenance team, it would probably cope well. But it would take a lot
of resources to prevent the endless "it's not working on <linux distro x>"

> As a programmer I would like to have is an OSS python GUI toolkit that 
> looks great everywhere and acts the same on all platforms without
> custom  hack in the app code.

PyQT is worth a look. However, that carries the cost of Qt's weird
windows licensing quirks.

> There is currently no such thing

True, but (IMHO) the PMW/Tkinter combination comes very close
(http://pmw.sourceforge.net).

> and my little mind cannot understand why.
> Ok... so its a lot of work to create such a thing

Creating such a thing is relatively straightforward. Making it practical
- easily learned, easy to setup and use, and respectful of resources
takes about 5-50 times that amount of work again.

There's a lot of good gui libs, but they're hard to understand unless
you're willing to study the implementation's source code, or even live
with the developer and suck the pizza stains off his/her T-shirt.

Please do have a serious try of Tkinter, with the PMW classes over the
top. I've been there, from scared gui neophyte to someone that can build
smart, platform-independent guis - all the pain and labour you put into
learning Tkinter, you will recoup in joy and satisfaction as your apps
Simply Just Work. Tkinter-based progs also package well into windows
standalone EXE packages (eg Py2EXE), so you can spare your users the
confusion of installing/setting up their own Python environment.

Cheers
David

[Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Peter D. <pd...@gm...>]

Hello list,

I've been looking around at python GUI toolkits just for fun and I came  
across AnyGUI.
It is very impressive but I think it solves the wrong problem. Let me  
explain myself:
People want to create GUIs but there are very few people that want "just"  
an user interface, most of them want their GUI to work flawlessly. The  
fact that it can run on different platforms on different toolkits might  
not be such a great thing if the developers of the app will have to  
continuously "fix" the app for some esoteric combinations of OS  
versions-toolkit versions-python versions. This distracts them from  
solving the real problem: what the app should do.
AnyGUI tries to unify the API and use existing toolkits BUT in this it  
opens not one but many cans of worms, not only will the end user have to  
deal with the quirks of one toolkit but with the quirks of many.

As a programmer I would like to have is an OSS python GUI toolkit that  
looks great everywhere and acts the same on all platforms without custom  
hack in the app code.
There is currently no such thing and my little mind cannot understand why.
Ok... so its a lot of work to create such a thing BUT I could not find any  
project that aims to create such a thing. PyUI looked like it could be  
something in the lines of what I'm looking for but from what I can see....  
the people creating it have a different target.

Here is how I see such a toolkit approached:
- defined the windowing (Frames and Panels)
- defined the layout (Layout managers, for starters something like  
BoxSizer and GidBagSizer from wxpython should do)
- defined the basic events/event loop
- defined the basic widgets (label, textfield, button, list, etc.)
- defined the renderer (this is the thing that actually creates the visual  
part of the widgets based on their attributes)
- the renderer should contain some kind of mechanism for rendering  
individual widgets, for starters a bitmap based one would be enough) think  
of something that could take a archive of PNGs and mimic the appearance of  
Windows, Mac, different themes of GTK or QT.

Advantages:
- once past the basic implementation of the windowing and event system  
people could test it and help implement the widgets (let's say the follow  
the implementation guidelines for let's say Button)
- this is a top-down implementation so in theory it should be less  
buggy.... maybe for starters we could use part of an established toolkit  
for the windowing and drawing only to replace it with a custom system  
written specifically for the job.

Every time I look at a toolkit I try to see how well the developers  
learned from their predecessors. For example... one of the best help  
systems I've come across is the wxPython Demo. In my view this should be  
present in each and every toolkit out there. Most of what I know today I  
learned from the Demo.

Now to the real question of this email.
What should a crazy enough person do to try and build such a toolkit? How  
could he reuse the work that went into AnyGUI?

Thanks for reading so far. :)

Peter.

[Anygui-devel] Web page update

[Magnus L. H. <ma...@he...>]

Hi!

I've updated the Web pages to make it clear that there's nothing going
on here. I've rewritten the main page to explain that the project is
no longer active, as well as to give a recommendation for using
wxPython, as that is the GUI toolkit Guido seems to prefer (at least
according to the quote on wxpython.org). Also, each page now has the
following note on top (in red):

  Note: Anygui is no longer being actively developed or supported.
  These pages are not up to date.

If, by some miracle, there is some development at some point, this
would, of course, be easy to change back.

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland                    Fall seven times, stand up eight
http://hetland.org                                  [Japanese proverb]

Re: [Anygui-devel] basic example doesn't work with wxPython

[Magnus L. H. <ma...@he...>]

Francisco Gutierrez <fra...@al...>:
>
> Hi,

Hi!

To post to this list you have to subscribe. (I've manually accepted
this post.)

> I am trying to develop a quick gui in python, and I downloaded both 
> anygui and wxPython.  I tried running the basic example in the tutorial:
> 
> import anygui as gui
> win=gui.Window()
> app=gui.Application()
> app.add(win)
> app.run()
> 
> and I get a blinking window that eventually dies.

Do you get a stack trace or something in the terminal where you run it
(if you do run it from a terminal)?

> When I imported the tk gui as gui directly the example worked. So
> the reason I am writing is to ask:  1) Is this a known problem?

I don't think so...

Which version of Anygui are you using?

> If so how do I fix it?  and, 2) In order to use anygui without
> having to uninstall wxPython, is there a way to make tk my default
> gui instead of tk?

You could use the wish list mechanism, for example by setting the
environment variable ANYGUI_WISHLIST to 'tk'.

On the other hand -- please note that Anygui is not being actively
developed or supported. It might be a better idea to simply use the
wxPython API directly. It's available for most/all platforms and the
basic stuff is more or less as easy as Anygui. PyQt and Tkinter aren't
too hard either. (It seems Guido prefers wxPython, though [1].)

[1] http://wxpython.org/quotes.php

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland                    Fall seven times, stand up eight
http://hetland.org                                  [Japanese proverb]

[Anygui-devel] basic example doesn't work with wxPython

[Francisco G. <fra...@al...>]

Hi, I am trying to develop a quick gui in python, and I downloaded both 
anygui and wxPython.  I tried running the basic example in the tutorial:

import anygui as gui
win=gui.Window()
app=gui.Application()
app.add(win)
app.run()

and I get a blinking window that eventually dies.  When I imported the 
tk gui as gui directly the example worked.
So the reason I am writing is to ask:  1) Is this a known problem?  If 
so how do I fix it?  and, 2) In order to use anygui without having to 
uninstall wxPython, is there a way to make tk my default gui instead of tk?

Thanks,
Francisco Gutierrez