July 22, 2002
GUI programming with PythonCard

Building GUI Applications with PythonCard and PyCrust.

Looks interesting. I've not tried PythonCard. Most of my GUI building is in Java, and it's a pig. Anything to make it easier can only be a good thing.

The seperation of the GUI logic from the GUI layout can only be a good thing. If it works, that is. Layout managers can be a royal pain (especially if you have to write your own to get the layout that you want), but they are powerful. For example, making resizing work they way that you want it to work relies of this level of control.

Posted to Python by Simon Brunning at July 22, 2002 01:24 PM
Comments

I'm a big fan of PythonCard - I haven't used it for anything serious yet but the few things I have done with it have showed it to be a powerful, effective and above all easy way to create basic GUIs. Unfortunately the one thing it doesn't handle well is resizing - applications built with the layout manager have fixed co-ordinates imposed on their widgets and if you want to build in resizing logic you have to dive in to the code. Eventually the PythonCard guys hope to implement some kind of resizing support but they are finding it hard to come up with a way of letting people design resizing applications while keeping the layout manager interface as simple as possible.

Posted by: Simon Willison on July 22, 2002 02:38 PM

Hmm. Resizing seems to be the thing that causes problems to all GUI builders.

Thing is, the majority on panels in a project probably don't need to be resizable, so a tool like PythonCard is still useful. But you need to be able to hand code the panels which do need to be resizable - that's anything with a scrollable list, text area, that sort of thing.

Posted by: Simon Brunning on July 23, 2002 12:21 PM
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