From: "W. Kent Starr" <elderburn@...>
Date: 2001-03-21T08:37:33+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:12994] Re: TextBox ListBox

On Tuesday 20 March 2001 15:51, Avi Bryant wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Ron Jeffries wrote:
> > At the moment, it looks like the state of Ruby/Tk is such that we
> > could make millions by writing a book about how to open a f'g window.
>
> Has anyone built Ruby/Gtk on windows?  I've in general found Gtk far, far
> more pleasant to work with than Tk, and with Glade and Ruby thrown into
> the mix it's a dream for rapid prototyping.  It's a shame that Ron and
> others in the windows world are unable to make use of it... next time I
> have a windows box handy maybe I'll look into getting that going.
>

Unfortunately, Gtk and Windows don't get along all that well. And, from what 
I am told (don't have the resources to personally corroborate) Gtk and Mac 
don't get along at all :-(

The only _truly_ cross platform windowing toolkit at the moment is Tk. I thnk 
much of the problem we may be having with Ruby/Tk is lack of extensive 
documentation in other than Japanese, which , again, many of us (to our 
collective discredit and myself included) do not read. :-(

And, while Tk does work with Macs, I am told (again, cannot verify) that the 
Mac people are not overly enthusiastic about it. I am not sure whether they 
mean Tk or Tcl/Tk; my Mac friends may not be sure either, since they have not 
been able to give me an answer.

Another issue I hear is that Tk is "ugly"; more than likely, this results 
from "ugly" interfaces designed in Tk, but that is a subjective issue. Main 
problem I personally have with Tk is that, in its native propagation, support 
for other than gif format is lacking. In addition to the "Unisys problem", 
jpeg ofers a far broader color range for phtorealistics and PNG offers 
lossless compression and far better alpha channel capabilities. I haven't 
been following developments too closely so don't know for sure the what, and 
more important, the when of Tk 8.4; hoepfully the image rendering support 
issues will be resolved there.

Regards,

Kent Starr
elderburn@mindspring.com