From: Chris Alfeld <chris.alfeld@...>
Date: 2006-04-07T23:38:39+09:00
Subject: Re: is GUI a weak point?

Yes, Fox has a lot of very nice features and I'm keeping a very
interested eye on it.  It is unfortunate that it currently does not
run natively (without X11) on OS X.  If it did I would be using it and
not Ruby/Tk.

In defense of Tk, I gather from your comments that you arae using the
core Tk.  This provides fairly low level widget primitives.  There are
plenty of packages (many of whicih exist for Ruby/Tk) which provide
higher level widgets such as superior list boxes, trees, etc.  For
example BLT, Iwidgets, Bwidgets, ...  I view Tk as a lower level
toolkit than Fox and others, just as X11 is an even lower level
toolkit below Tk.

As I've written before I believe that Tk is not good for building
modern GUIs.  But when I say this I am not speaking of the widget set.
 I'm speaking of lacking core concepts.  Tk requires a root toplevel
to exist at all times: if you withdraw it it vanishes from the screen
but now, if you have no other toplevels, keyboard events don't
register; it has limited ability for a "first responder" type of
behavior; etc.