[Pyobjc-dev] Standalone table app

[David E. <epp...@ic...>]

I seem to have hit a plateau with the table editor I've been playing with 
as a test of using pyobjc for making standalone apps.  So, in the hope that 
it will be useful to someone, provide a helpful example of how to (or how 
not to) make a pyobjc app, or elicit suggestions for improvement, I've made 
it available on my web site:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/tabulizer/

Known issues:

* The application itself is big (7.7Mb).  More than half of the bulk is due 
to including _xmlplus due to Apple's failure to include pyexpat in the 
default command-line Python.  Pyexpat itself is not so big (460k) so maybe 
it would be possible to reduce the build size.

* There is not currently an easy way of exchanging data with other programs 
(e.g. spreadsheets, word processors, or web browsers).  I think I need more 
understanding of how the file open and save dialogs work before reading and 
writing other file formats can be supported (currently, the only format is 
xml) and I also haven't done anything about handling drag and drop or 
pasting of spreadsheet tables.

* This is a very new program, tested only by me, so is probably quite 
buggy.  In particular, I still have not resolved the problem I reported to 
pyobjc-dev on 12/11/02, that starting the app by double-clicking on its 
icon fails to open a new document.

* Startup time is slow.

* I think I've made a build that will run on default X.2 installations, 
without need for installation of pyobjc or _xmlplus.  But the only machine 
I have running X.2 is my development machine in which those packages are 
installed.  I tested that it works if I clear out .../site-packages/ from 
the Python lib, but I haven't tested it on a vanilla X.2 machine.

* There are some standard Cocoa services I'm not using and probably should, 
including undo (I have my own undo manager instead) and help browser (help 
command instead opens a web page in your default browser).

--
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
epp...@ic... http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/