Kevin Altis: PythonCard

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 17:47:37 GMT

David McNab has written a walkthrough for PythonCard titled Increasing Usefulness with Timers and Threads

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 18:03:26 GMT

Pygick

I wanted to find out how quick PythonCard is, to learn and use. Answer - it is the quickest to make GUIs! Then I thought about what kind of application I can write. Making a easy to use batch image processor seemed like a good idea. I vaguely remember seeing an application like this - so whatever I could remember from that applications' GUI as a base, made an application. I used PythonMagick, a library for ImageMagick functions.

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 19:16:45 GMT

PyObjC is interesting, but not relevant to me

I don't expect I'll be using PyObjC much myself because I'm committed to writing cross-platform applications. That is why I'm using Python, wxPython and PythonCard to write apps that run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. I don't know Objective-C and I really don't have any interest in learning a single OS API such as Cocoa anymore than I want to invest a lot of time in .NET that only works with Windows.

Yes, .NET may someday run on the Mac, but I'll bet it won't ever work on Linux. I think the Mono project is deluding itself if it thinks that someday it won't get crushed by the MS lawyers, so that isn't an option for .NET compatibility. I'll be very pleased if Mono does succeed, but I won't consider investing time even looking at C# and .NET for a couple of years. I'm very happy with Python and libs for Python.

I've changed my primary operating system many times in the past and I expect that I will again, so cross-platform, open source languages and libraries are the thing for me. In fact, all of the PythonCard code that I've written in the last year and half is now working on my G4 tower.

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 18:22:53 GMT

PythonCard 0.7

PythonCard is a GUI construction kit for building cross-platform desktop applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The latest release of PythonCard includes over 40 sample applications and tools to help users edit and build applications in Python. Check out the sample pages for screenshots and info about the samples.

The documentation page has links to installation instructions for Windows that covers installing Python, wxPython, and PythonCard. Check the changelog for a complete list of changes for release 0.7.

Mon, 23 Dec 2002 22:15:19 GMT

New Sample Pages

There are new pages on the PythonCard web site showing off the samples included with PythonCard. Some of the samples (gadflyDatabase, life, simpleIEBrowser, spirograph) are not in release 0.6.9, but you can get them from cvs.

There is a wiki page describing how to install and use cvs. If you want to keep up with changes between releases, you should definitely use the cvs version of PythonCard as releases are only made every one to three months. A complete list of changes since the last release is available in the changelog.

Fri, 20 Dec 2002 01:01:23 GMT

case-insensitive sort of list of strings

I added a new recipe to the Python Cookbook.

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/170242

There are some additional comments about the recipe on the PythonCard-users mailing list.

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 17:08:19 GMT

PythonCard 0.6.9

The documentation page has links to installation instructions for Windows that covers installing Python, wxPython, and PythonCard. Check the changelog for a complete list of changes for release 0.6.9.

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 20:36:02 GMT

Jon Udell has posted an article about Python as the "scripting language [to] drive a major, user-facing, GUI-intensive application". I have often wondered myself why Mahogany wasn't done in Python and wxPython instead of C++ and wxWindows.

We're exploring the scriptability of apps with PythonCard. Both the codeEditor and textEditor expose the Python shell, which is built-in to all PythonCard applications. However, rather than just having a menu item to hide and show the shell, we added the ability to run scripts, or Scriptlets as I like to call them which are analogous to the VBA scripts people can run in Microsoft Office.

The entire object model of a PythonCard application is exposed, so if an app doesn't have the feature you want, you can probably extend it with a short "macro" in Python. All scripts are run in the shell, so they share the shell namespace and thus scripts can share variables since the namespace doesn't go away until the application is closed. I posted an example of a scriptlet with the codeEditor back in May.

Fri, 19 Jul 2002 01:09:58 GMT

Building GUI Applications with PythonCard and PyCrust by Patrick K. O'Brien

Patrick put together this article for O'Reilly to give people a taste of what we'll be covering during our OSCON presentation on Thursday, July 25th.

Wed, 17 Jul 2002 23:54:34 GMT

PythonCard 0.6.8

PythonCard is a GUI construction kit for building cross-platform desktop applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The latest release of PythonCard includes over 30 sample applications and four tools to help users edit and build applications in Python. This release also supports the new wxPython 2.3.3 preview for Mac OS X.

The documentation page has links to installation instructions for Windows that covers installing Python, wxPython, and PythonCard. Dan Shafer added an extensive resourceEditor overview last month that should be of interest to anyone using PythonCard. There is a set of Wiki pages for "in progress" documentation and to supplement the main web site. Check the changelog for a complete list of changes for release 0.6.8.

Mon, 24 Jun 2002 17:35:48 GMT

PythonCard Name Change?

Should the PythonCard project have a different name? A thread started up last week about maybe changing the name. You can follow the discussion in the mailing list archive. I created a PythonCardNameChange wiki page that covers some of the issues and provides a bit of history on how we arrived at the project name in the first place. The early posts from the mailing list are good background material. You'll have to click the "prev 20" link to move backwards through the threads, since the link above points to the start of the mailing list.

Fri, 14 Jun 2002 16:38:31 GMT

PythonCard 0.6.7

PythonCard is a GUI construction kit for building cross-platform desktop applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The latest release of PythonCard includes over 30 sample applications, new additions include chat, webserver, pictureViewer, slideshow, and webgrabber, a sample to download web sites. The webserver sample comes ready to run XML-RPC server scripts. This release also supports the new wxPython 2.3.3 preview for Mac OS X.

Four of the samples have been promoted to tools status: codeEditor, findfiles, resourceEditor, and textEditor.

The documentation page has links to installation instructions for Windows that covers installing Python, wxPython, and PythonCard. Dan Shafer added an extensive resourceEditor overview for this release. There is a new set of Wiki pages for "in progress" documentation and to supplement the main web site. Check the changelog for a complete list of changes for release 0.6.7.

Wed, 12 Jun 2002 22:40:12 GMT

Just a reminder that Patrick O'Brien and I will be doing a presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) this summer in San Diego called Building GUI Applications With PythonCard And PyCrust. The conference is from July 22-26, and our session is scheduled for Thursday, July 25 from 1:45pm - 2:30pm in the Marina III room.

If you will be attending OSCON and would like to find out more about PythonCard, please let me (Kevin Altis) know. I will be in San Diego at the Sheraton all week and would love to get together to discuss PythonCard with anyone interested.

Wed, 12 Jun 2002 21:29:22 GMT

XML-RPC server in PythonCard 0.6.7

A new release of PythonCard should be out in the next couple of days. You can download it from cvs now if you don't want to wait. Among the many new samples is a GUI front-end to the web server that comes with the Python Standard Libraries. In addition to serving files, the webserver sample can do CGI, so it is a great way to get a web server up quickly on your desktop; all you have to do is double-click the script. Several example CGI scripts are included with the server.

I added Mark Pilgrim's PyWebServices scripts, so the webserver can act as an XML-RPC server too. After starting up the webserver sample you can test the XML-RPC server capabilities by running the radioclient sample, which automatically shows the shell and imports the xmlrpclib module. Then try this in the shell:

>>> server = xmlrpclib.Server('http://localhost/cgi-bin/webservices.py')
>>> server.system.listMethods()
{'sample.helloWorld()': 'None', 'examples.getStateName(stateIndex)': 'None', 
'system.listMethods()': 'None'}
>>> server.sample.helloWorld()
'Hello World!'
>>> server.examples.getStateName(1)
'Alabama'
>>> server.examples.getStateName(50)
'Wyoming'