Re: Pythoncard fork: latest post here.

Hello.

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 5:41 PM, Nextime <[email protected]> wrote:
> So, with all my thanks for all original developers of pythoncard
> for the base code of the new project, i have forked pythoncard.

I love Pythoncard, and as a casual hobby programmer, PythonCard has
given me an easy to use way make GUIs for my Python programs.  It's
helped me transition from Visual Basic to Python (moving away from VB,
by far the biggest obstacle is replacing the superb interface building
tools).  Looking for a quick and easy way to do a GUI with Python,
PythonCard came out way ahead of Glade/QT/wxWidgets/etc.

I do think there is PythonCard development going on, but it's no doubt
done in whatever spare time the developers have.  However, where I
think a lot of end users have lost confidence in the project is simply
that despite whatever development may be happening, there hasn't been
a history of frequent releases of executable installers.  Rather than
very infrequent releases with major changes, end users prefer frequent
releases with incremental improvements.


>  - dropping out codeEditor, resourceEditor,

Please don't drop codeEditor... I quite liked it as part of the
package; very useful.


>  - change resource files to an XML format

I know that XML is the cool thing these days, but whatever you do,
please keep the files in a simple enough format that they can be
hand-edited if necessary.  I liken it to HTML versus CSS... HTML you
can do by hand, and it's simple.  CSS is so complex that it's barely
human-readable.  It may be great if you're using expensive proprietary
software for web development, but it's an example of complexity going
beyond the bounds of being beneficial, and instead becoming a burden.

Beyond that, I haven't had an itch to scratch with programming for a
while, so I can't comment too much on Pythoncard's current state.
Although I'll probably be updating my Python install to 2.6 and
checking that my software still works... I recall that when reading
that they planned to break compatibility with past code in Python 2.6
that it sounded like a really boneheaded idea... hopefully I'll find
that it was only obscure code that was going to become incompatible.

Mark

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