[GRASS-dev] Python GUI toolkits

Wed Jun 7 16:49:03 EDT 2006

I am sure your work is great and greatly appreciated! For what it is
worth, I use Gnome on Linux, so I agree with you about GTK looking
good---it does to me anyway.

I was mainly concerned about Apple users. The last I heard, GTK was
not easy to install on Apple OSX and many apple users have a natural
revulsion to non-native apps (I don't own an apple so I don't
understand myself). Windows has never had a standard GUI so it is less
of an issue with Windows users.

I was toying with the idea of creating a Matlab or R-style GUI for
grass. The idea would be to have a command line interface with helper
applications such as graphics monitors, text editor, file browser,
help-system, etc. All accessible from tool bars. People seem to really
like Matlab once they learn it and I thought that if a grass version
were done right, even guys like me might use it (which means that I
better write code that I want to use!).

If the "shell" were Python, I could build most of this out of the
default tools in wxPython. In fact, I got a basic editor up and
running in about 100 lines of code!
All the pieces are there for display, editing, python interpreter,
color pickers etc.
I was looking at the XML specification for GUIs which could build a
GUI for command line tools on the fly the way gis.m does now. And the
framework seems flexible enough to make it really easy to add new
tools by non-programmers who know a few things about Python.

All that being said. It would be a real pain to maintain programs in 3
different GUI frameworks. If pyGTK works, maybe I ought to look at
that for my GUI.

David

On 6/7/06, Jachym Cepicky <jachym.cepicky at centrum.cz> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Jun 07, 2006 at 09:53:48AM -0700, David Finlayson wrote:
> > It looks like v.pyedit is written in pyGTK rather than wxPython. Will
> > v.pygtk run natively on Windows or Apple?
>
> Should run
>
> > Will it look like a native application?
>
> AFAIK now, does it harm? My experience with Gaim on windows area, that
> it looks almost like the native gui apps. My mother is using gaim and
> she has no problem with that, how it looks like.
>
> >
> > From my brief look at the toolkits, it seemed that wxPython was a
> > little more cross platform friendly because it used native widgets.
> >
>
> I was asking other users, if they could live with Gtk gui. Nobody
> answared. I do not understand, why any GUI should look "native". It
> should just be intuitive.
>
> I'm developing v.pydigit mostly for studing purposes. At the end should
> we be on the beginning of the new GRASS GUI (if any). v.pydigit should
> show, how to write things and show the posibilities and advantages of 3
> tools:
>
>     * python
>     * glade
>     * gtk+
>
> I thing, I can say now, that these tools
>
>     * are making gui development fast and easy even for non-programers
>     * the gui can be "fast enough" for common usage
>     * it is possible to run it even on not-so-well equiped computers
>     --
>     * I like the way, Gtk+ apps are looking/can look.
>     --
>     (Ones I tryed to work with python+Qt - it was sooo sloow)
>
> IIRC, there is no tool for wxWindows, which would act similar to Glade.
> Glade is producing XML files. What I read, the best tool like glade for
> gtk, would be wxglade for wxwindows. It produces pure xml file, which
> disables to bind results from glade in another language, but this is
> only how I understand it, so if anybody else would have experience with
> tools like this, I would welcome comments from your site.
>
> Anyway, if you or anybody else will start to develop any other GUI using
> wxWindows, you can count with me.
>
> BTW: New version of v.pydigit is able to digitize lines, boundaries,
> points and centroids. You can edit your attribute table and add
> attributes to new digitized features. I wrote some summary to another
> e-mail, but it did not come to this list so far.
>
> I newver said, v.pydigit will/should be *the* grass GUI or *the* grass
> digitalisation tool. The more it can, the more I thing, I would start
> from scratch and build most of the app again more as real GUI framework
> and not only one-tool program. But it could be here, until we will not
> have something more common, and people could use it for their common
> work. I hope to make it work better (user friendlier), than v.digit ever was
> (I'll see, how much time I'll have, this is not my only project and not
> the most importand one)
>
> Jachym
> --
> Jachym Cepicky
> e-mail: jachym.cepicky at centrum.cz
> URL: http://les-ejk.cz
> GPG: http://les-ejk.cz/gnupg_public_key/jachym_cepicky-gpg_public_key.asc
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-- 
David Finlayson