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Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

Arndt Roger Schneider arndt.roger at addcom.de
Tue Jan 18 16:45:48 EST 2011 
Adam Skutt schrieb:
> On Jan 18, 8:09 am, Arndt Roger Schneider <arndt.ro... at addcom.de>
> wrote:
> 
>>Back to rantingrick 21st century toolkit/framwork:
>>Let's have a look at the numbers:
>>Worlwide pc market are 300 Million pcs per year,
>>this number includes desktops(2/3) and servers(1/3).
>>Your gui app is not relevant on servers.
> 
> 
> You should tell this "fact" to just about every major enterprise
> software manufacturer out there.  They all ship GUI tools intended to
> be used on the server.  Some of them ship only GUI tools or CLI tools
> that are worthless, making you use the GUI tools.
> 
> 
>>The desktop pc market is in decline; there is
>>however a shift toward pc-servers, instead.
>>It is anybodies guess how far the pc-desktop decline will go.
>>Every 21st century toolkit or framework must run on
>>mobile platforms!
> 
> 
> Until we have pixel-perfect touch sensors, toolkits for devices with
> pointer interfaces (e.g., PCs) and toolkits for devices with touch
> interfaces (e.g., phones and tablets) will necessarily be different.
> 
> You note this yourself: the UI paradigms that work well when you have
> a pixel-perfect pointer do not work at all when you have a touch
> screen, especially on a limited size and resolution display.
> 

Yes I did and that's how it is.

> Even if you're provided a "single" toolkit, you still end up with two,
> maybe three, different applications, each using different widgets
> targeted for the device they run on.  And no one provides a "single"
> toolkit: while Silverlight can run on the desktop, the web, and now on
> Windows Phone, you can't use the same widgets everywhere; ditto with
> Cocoa for OS X and Cocoa Touch for iTouch devices.
> 
> While some further unification is obviously possible, it's rather
> doubtful we'll ever have unified widgets that are truly workable on
> the web, on the "desktop", and on a portable touch screen device.
> 

Think about all the programmers earning their butter and bread :-).
Forget toolkits and widgets for awhile.
What remains are specific types of human/computer interactions,
a visual representation on a screen and a predefined behaviour
for said human action.

E.g. a button is:
A function gets asychnronously performed in response to
a finger/mouse click and release inside a certain screen area.

--A widget is essentially a logical abstraction.

> 
>>wxWidgets was written ~1992, it is a copy of
>>mfc, which in turn is a copy of MacApp. MacApp
>>is also OSS, maintained through an industrie consortium.
>>Why do you not use the original framework?
>>
> 
> 
> Because it's not cross-platform, I'd imagine.  The entire point of
> wxWidgets was to provide a cross-platform "OOP" UI toolkit.  It
> closely copies MFC since MFC and XView were the two "backends" it
> supported.
> 

MacApp is/was cross-platform, Apple pulled the plug
on the non-mac platforms; the industrie
consortium took charge of the other platforms.

> 
>>Screen resolution:
>>   The time of 72ppi CRT monitors is over. A GUI
>>   framework/toolkit must be resolution independent,
>>   including all icons and indicators;
>>   it should use decluttering (newspeak:ZUI).
>>
> 
> 
> WPF is the only functional resolution-independent UI toolkit in
> existence.  While I don't disagree with you in principal, practice is
> pretty heavily divorced from principal here.  Principal doesn't help
> me write GUI applications today.
> 
> 
>>wxWidgets is not suitable for a modern type
>>GUI ad thus clearly not the toolkit/framework
>>of the 21st century.
> 
> 
> None of the toolkits accessible from CPython are suitable for a 21st
> century guy by your standard.  If we talk about IronPython,
> Silverlight becomes the closest, but it isn't a panacea by any stretch
> of the imagination.
> 
> Adam
> 
According to Microsoft neither is silverlight.
-roger
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