Comments on: Cross-Platform GUI Programming

By: Head Geek

Head Geek — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:53:51 +0000

We’ll see.

By: Joshua Lee

Joshua Lee — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 03:59:36 +0000

I don’t know about that, Tcl/Tk is a classic toolkit to use as a front end to non-graphical applications, which I think is your application. (Of course, it’s become a lot more practical as a GUI environment for stand-alone applications.)

By: Head Geek

Head Geek — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 03:48:26 +0000

Sorry, plenty of more interesting stuff to do for the foreseeable future.

By: Joshua Lee

Joshua Lee — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 05:09:16 +0000

It looks like it addresses both longstanding performance (though that’s remediable as its highly extendable and embeddable in C) and look and feel issues. I’ll have to let you know if there’s any letdowns. If you want to have some idea of what it’s like and what it does, the Tcl’er’s wiki is a very nice source. (IIRC http://wiki.tcl.tk)

By: Head Geek

Head Geek — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 01:46:32 +0000

If you give it a try, let me know what you think of it. I doubt it will be much better than wxWidgets for my purposes, but I like to keep up on various technologies.

By: Joshua Lee

Joshua Lee — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 11:57:43 +0000

BTW, the new version of Tcl/Tk, 8.5, has finally been released, with the more flexible and reportedly less ugly look and feel. I’ll have to give it a try.

Hopefully the other scripting languages will pick up on the latest Tk as well soon enough. The ones that implement it modularly, such as Python, will do it very soon, though of course the modular implementation has the drawback of needing Tcl/Tk on one’s system. (It’s a very small run-time though, a heck of a lot smaller than the typical Windows run-time, or even smaller than Ruby/Perl/Python etc. Of course, the Tcl language and libraries are much smaller… If only Tcl was more elegant, but I sort of like some of its warts. I actually think the concept of the language keyword as a “tool command”, complete with something that looks like option flags ah-lah POSIX command line arguments, is pretty cool. )

By: Head Geek

Head Geek — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:59:36 +0000

Under Linux, wxWidgets can target GTK+, MGL, or X11. I'd never heard of MGL before, but it's easily possible that you saw a version compiled for some system that you weren't used to.

(And GTK+, at least, does have native widgets. :-p ).

By: Joshua Lee

Joshua Lee — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:26:18 +0000

PS, The X Window System has no “native widgets”.

By: Joshua Lee

Joshua Lee — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:25:43 +0000

I didn't "hear" that, I saw it, under Linux at least... Of course, it does resemble gtk+ version two which isn't too bad looking. I suspect the application may have misused it or something.

By: Head Geek

Head Geek — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:00:22 +0000

I’m not sure where you heard that, because wxWidgets uses the native “widgets” (windows, controls, dialogs, etcetera) for each platform. It’s hard to tell the difference between a wxWidgets application and one written in the pure API for the platform in question, other than at the source code level. If you’re careful to use them, there are even ways to arrange the buttons differently according to the preferred button order for each platform.