Re: OK, everyone...

Laura Creighton <[email protected]>:
>
> I think that part of the problem is that while anygui is fun to think about,
> and learn about graphical systems and widget hacking with, it is rather
> less needed now than it was when we first proposed it.

I think you may be right. (I've read Alex's response, and he makes
some interesting points too.)

I think it was really unfortunate that our efforts petered out before
we got some kind of release of the 0.2 codebase. Many people won't use
something that isn't released (reasonably enough). It may be that
Anygui won't be a widespread toolkit, but I still think it deserves at
least one final release based on its current architecture.

> A lot of the people who were initially interested in using anygui, I think, 
> were actually looking for something more like PythonCard.  When that 
> happened, they moved there.  So did Patrick.  So there went the 'I
> want a simple GUI' people.

Yeah. Except me <wink>.

[snip about running everywhere and Tkinter]
> On the other hand, wxPython and PyQt are being ported to everything 
> under the sun.  There was a time when wxWindoes did not run on the Mac,
> but no more, and so on and so forth.

Yeah. And with the new wx package, the aesthetics of the wxPython API
is acceptable even to weirdoes like me... (who don't like names like
wxButton etc.) :]

> Thus the people who had the rationale (I cannot program in XXX, my
> favourite gui, because it does not run everywhere) are now finding
> that it actually does run all the places they were interested.

Yes, I agree.

Thus, trying to compete with (e.g.) wxPython is quite certainly a lost
cause. But I keep getting emails from people who say that Anygui is a
"Good Idea(tm)", so even if it doesn't get much more complete than it
is (except, perhaps, with the addition of menus and basic dialogs) I
think getting a release out, and maintaining it with bugfixes seems
like a useful thing to do. Or, whatever the reason, I, for one, would
like to do it.

> Finally, there were the people who were interested in anygui as a
> teaching tool.  We are still interested, but there never was a lot
> of us.

True.

> And we aren't the most useful people to have on a project, because
> we aren't fanatics about finding things in a broken, half-finished
> state, because we can learn a lot about how things ought to work by
> watching things that don't work properly.

:)

> So we will have fun no matter what you do. I catch myself thinking
> 'what a cool, interesting bug.  I want to understand it.' -- all
> well and good, but notice I didn't say, 'I want to fix it.', which
> would be more useful for the project.

Sure. But: If we get a release out (however basic) there will be a
sort of a feedback-loop in place: If nobody uses Anygui, nobody will
report bugs, and it won't really matter. The more people uses it, the
more people will report bugs, and the more it will matter. Fixing
reported bugs is (I think...) easier than finding them in the first
place.

> But running all the demos in a wide-variety of gui-ends is still a blast.
> The problem is that I get a nagging feeling 'isn't there something else
> you could be doing that would be more useful'?  I think that this is the
> feeling, more than anything, which kills projects.

Sure.

But mightn't getting a release out that is actually usable, and which
could (by a few of us) be maintained mainly in terms of bugfixes, be
worth it? We could then clearly define what Anygui is and what it
isn't and if anyone has use for it, they can use it.

It just seems like a pity that all the effort we've put into it should
just sit there because of the last couple of hurdles...

> Just my two cents,
> Laura

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland           "The mind is not a vessel to be filled,
http://hetland.org            but a fire to be lighted."  [Plutarch]


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