Monday, April 29, 2002

Dan Shafer has posted a screenshot of the PythonCard widgets sample running on OS X. This shot shows that while most of the controls look fine, the Calendar is clearly broken, the Button has too much whitespace padding, and there is a need to pad with a little more space on buttons with really long names. Still not too bad. Andy Todd put up a shot of widgets on Linux/GTK. Obviously, there are some display issues there too. Those are basically from the widgets sample not using sizers, just static placement. More elaborate layout management is on the To Do list. You can do sizers manually in source code just like you can with wxPython, but there is no automatic way of specifying the sizers right now in the the GUI layout tool. For comparison, here's the same widgets sample running on my Windows 2000 box. 10:08:36 PM

New wxPython Mac builds will probably be appearing almost daily, so be sure to check the wxMacPython preview files area often if you want to keep up with the bugs as they are fixed. 9:54:36 PM

PythonCard and XML-RPC Simon Willison posted a message to the pythoncard-users mailing list on Sunday that made me smile. "Firstly, I've only been using PythonCard for 12 hours and I'm in love... having never written a Windows application (or proper Python application for that matter) before it took me a little over 4 hours to put together a web-service enabled notepad clone that uses XMLRPC (and a PHP server) to save files to a web server. In conjunction with a web based front end I've got myself a very handy place to store notes online, and the possibilities for extending the XMLRPC + PythonCard combination seem endless." The amazing thing wasn't that Simon had built a PythonCard front-end to an XML-RPC or SOAP service, we already have a few examples of that that come with PythonCard. No, what I was so happy to see, was that someone that hadn't created an application before was able to download PythonCard and build their first app that actually does something quite useful in such a short period of time. Simon documented Using PythonCard with XML-RPC and he also put up a screenshot of his application, ScratchPad. 10:06:41 AM