PythonCard and Boa Constructor not ready yet, according to Andrew Dalke.
His major criticism of both tools is that there is no support for any layout management other than absolute positioning. This is a fair criticism - many of your dialogs need to be resizable, and absolute positioning just won't cut the mustard. But then again, many dialogs don't need to be resizable, and I've found that PythonCard works fine for these.
Support for layout management is in the pipeline for PythonCard, and I'm looking forward to it. (How close is it, Andy?) Until then. you'll need to hand code some of your panels. (I'm just learning a bit of wxPython now - this section from Mark Hammond and Andy Robinson's "Python Programming on Win32" is a good starting point.) But PythonCard can already help you out with many (most?) dialogues, saving lots of time.
Posted to Python by Simon Brunning at October 07, 2003 11:26 AMSizers are the number 1 requested feature for PythonCard, and the hardest to implement. There are a couple of sample implementations knocking around but nothing has been implemented yet. Its still not clear whether the existing framework will support sizers or whether it will require a big bang approach and some major re-work.
Posted by: Andy Todd on October 7, 2003 02:52 PMUse wxGlade instead. That is, use Boa or PythonCard to learn wxPython details, then use wxGlade to design your GUI. Boa generates code that strikes me as aesthetically unappealing, but wxGlade's generated code seems a lot cleaner. Of course, it *does* less than Boa, but within its self-proclaimed limits it, to my mind, works better. Further, wxGlade more-or-less forces you to use sizers, and makes it easy to do.
Posted by: phoukka on October 7, 2003 06:06 PMBut without automatic sizers, the differences in fonts on the different platforms may make the result look ugly, and it precludes support for changing font size.
I also didn't like the lack of support for changing tab order and the lack of support for ActiveX widgets when on MS Windows.
I like Qt Designer's support for layout. Plop the widgets on the screen then select the ones which should be aligned horizontally or vertically or on a grid and select that option. Poof - they are in a sizer. That's easier then having to think of the hierarchy while designing the form, which
appears to be required for wxGlade. But I'll take a look at
that too.
You may be interested to know that the version 0.2.6 of Boa-Constructor (from CVS only) has preliminary support for sizers.
They are not as intuitive to use as wxGlade but they are there there.