[prog] Cross platform Python GUIs

[Akkana Peck]

Michael Bentley writes:
> 
> On May 16, 2007, at 4:08 AM, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> >What are people's preferred GUI libraries for cross-platform  
> >Python? And
> >how do you distribute the code?

I've been reasonably happy with pygtk. It's a lot easier to use
than C gtk (as long as you don't need to do anything low-level,
like tweaking with focus handling), and the documentation is decent.
I haven't tried packaging any python apps for each OS, though;
I just make the python script available and let people get pygtk
themselves.  Which probably means that I don't have many win/mac
users, realistically.

My experiences with wxWidgets have all been fairly frustrating,
involving a lot of working around bugs present in some versions
but not others. Maybe it's stabilized by now. It does have the
advantage of being very cross-platform (if anything, I get the
impression that it works better on Windows than on Linux).

I haven't tried Tkinter so that may be a better option still.

> popular options are PyQt and PyGTK, but both of those are problematic  
> on the Mac (the nicest Mac-only GUI is PyObjC).

What are the PyGTK problems on the Mac? I'm pretty sure I tested
some simple pygtk apps on OS X in the past, but not recently, and not
with any complex apps.

Qt (with or without Python) used to be problematic on the Mac
because of cost: it was free on Linux but quite expensive for Mac
users. But I think their licenses have improved since then.
Is it free everywhere now? Are there other problems?

-- 
    ...Akkana
    "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional": http://gimpbook.com