🌐 Mailman 3 January 2005 - Pythonmac-SIG - python.org

Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] Python for OSX programming beginner?
by Russell E Owen March 20, 2005

March 20, 2005

>Been lurking here for a while and quietly observing. > >I am looking for a programming language and preferably and IDE for a >young nephew wanting to dip his toes in the programming pool... >Is Python worth further investigating and how good are the IDEs? >Is there something along the lines of REALbasic VisualBasic >integrated interface/code style IDE available? >What are the specialities limits of the language? >Why learn Python rather than battle on and master C or more >particularly Objective C ? >Rather difficult to answer, but how different is the learning curve? > >Many thanks for any help. Hmmm...I suggest the following: Smalltalk: Squeak and VisualWorks NC are both free (the latter only for noncommercial use). Smalltalk is a lovely, simple really powerful language that includes: - powerful IDE and class browser with integrated debugger; smalltalk has the best development environment I've ever seen for a language because it includes live debugging, live changing of classes (want to fix a method? go ahead; the change propagates; fix it and continue on the fly) - really simple yet powerful language; one of the most elegant languges I've seen, though the syntax is a bit different than C and Python programmers are used to - very rich class library, including one of the nicest collection classes (lists, sets, etc.) available Between these two, squeak is smaller and more fun and includes a nifty GUI called Morphic; however it all runs in one big window (very non-Mac like). VisualWorks is more Mac-like (at least on a Mac) and more mature, but is much larger. Both are fully cross-platform (write once, run everywhere). One limitation to smalltalk is that it's not much good for simple scripting, hence simple text processing scripts and such. Python really shines there, so... Python. This is a really nice language and he'll be able to go far with it. However, based on what you said above, some of its limitations make me nervous: - there is no really well integrated GUI, unlike the suggestions above. You can do GUI programming, but you have to choose a 3rd party package and they are fully powerful, but the two main ones (Tkinter and wxPython) are somewhat clumsy and poorly documented. - hence there is no really first rate IDE (not to put down the IDEs that are there, but in comparison to smalltalk or RealBasic...) Note: python is built into MacOS X 10.2, but it's an outdated version missing some of the things that make the language sane (such as readlines support and a GUI package). Install the missing items or a better package (if you've been reading you've seen various options for that including at least one recent binary installer). I suggest learning those two (since their few weaknesses are complimentary), but you could also consider: Buy RealBasic. The knowledge is well worth the money! It's not a wonderful language, but not so bad either and if he already knows it, well...that's a huge leg up. Java. Not sure what the IDE situation is for MacOS X, but the language is reasonable (much saner than C++). The problem is that the need to declare the type of all objects makes it a clumsy and messy language compared to Python and Smalltalk. I suggest NOT using C++. The language is too arcane and messy. The object model is insanely complicated and the pitfalls fill volumes. Learn to program first, then learn C++ later if you really have to. -- Russell

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[OT] To upgrade Mac OSX or not?
by Skip Montanaro March 4, 2005

March 4, 2005

This is probably a bit off-topic for this list, but is the only Mac-specific mailing list I subscribe to, and Mac OSX versioning seems to affect MacPython and many apps built with it. I was prompted to write after seeing Brian Lenihan's post about PySol for Mac OSX. Visiting the page I saw "10.3 only". *sigh* Yet another app I can't run on my laptop. Here's the rub. Apple seems to rather quickly drop support for what appear (numerically) to be minor releases. 10.1 is long gone. I have 10.3 on my G5 and 10.2 on my laptop. I'm loathe to buy 10.3 at this point for my laptop because 10.4 is in beta (right? Apple offered a preview version of 10.4 to me for $500 recently). I figure as soon as I buy 10.3, 10.4 final will be released. 10.3 will start to corrode and I'll be stuck again with "old" software once again. Only now I have two Macs, so the costs are double. It seems that Apple's upgrade policy almost forces me to buy new versions as soon as they are released. If I snooze when new releases come out I quickly get left in the dust and wind up either skipping a version or upgrading right before the next release. (This has happened to me in the past.) I really hate to say this, but in this respect backward compatibility in Windows seems to be much better. Am I missing something? Thx, -- Skip Montanaro skip(a)mojam.com http://www.mojam.com/

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How do you find the app that matches a creator type
by has Feb. 12, 2005

Feb. 12, 2005

Read Roberts wrote: >Using the package pointed to by Bob Ippolito, I >find I cannot use the import statement suggested >by has hengist, although it may work with the >package that he points to. My version exported everything from package's main namespace, allowing one to write: import LaunchServices # imports LaunchServices' functions and constants but it looks like the official LaunchServices package requires one to import its sub-modules directly: import LaunchServices.Launch # imports LaunchServices' functions import LaunchServices.LaunchServices # imports LaunchServices' constants Not sure what the logic behind this is: it's less convenient for the user, but OTOH there may be a good reason for it. Maybe Jack or Bob can enlighten? has -- http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/

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ANN: Python 2.3->2.4 "compatibility" package
by Bob Ippolito Feb. 2, 2005

Feb. 2, 2005

I've put together a quick set of packages that brings a few new/updated modules from Python 2.4 to Python 2.3: Cross-platform: new subprocess module new decimal module For Mac OS X: new LaunchServices wrapper new OSA wrapper updated QuickTime package A binary installer built with bdist_mpkg is available from: http://undefined.org/python/Python23Compat.zip Sources are available by svn at: http://svn.red-bean.com/bob/Python23Compat/trunk/ The installer can be built as follows (assuming py2app trunk installed): % python setup.py bdist_mpkg or % bdist_mpkg -- (the -- makes sure it doesn't open up N installers.. bdist_mpkg by default automatically opens the new package) -bob

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Did I bust py2app?
by Charles Hartman Feb. 1, 2005

Feb. 1, 2005

I haven't used it for a while. Now when I try to make an app of the thing I've been working on -- OR of a separate package (part of appscript)! -- I get "ObjectGraph not found." ObjectGraph.py(c) *is* in /Library/Python/2.3/py2app/altgraph. So what did I do?? Charles Hartman

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What are "METH_CLASS" and "METH_STATIC"?
by Opstad, Dave Jan. 31, 2005

Jan. 31, 2005

I've had good luck building C-language extensions for my Python work, at least up until now. I've got a C file which #includes Carbon.h as well as the canonical Python.h. Attempting to use distutils to build it fails with the error message: ld: build/temp.darwin-7.7.0-Power_Macintosh-2.3/MacUtils/macutilsmodule.o illegal reference to symbol: _FSPathMakeRef defined in indirectly referenced dynamic library /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Carb onCore.framework/Versions/A/CarbonCore when executing this line: gcc -Wl,-F. -bundle -framework Python build/temp.darwin-7.7.0-Power_Macintosh-2.3/MacUtils/macutilsmodule.o -o build/lib.darwin-7.7.0-Power_Macintosh-2.3/macutilsbackend.so So I tried recompiling/linking by using the same line but adding "-framework Carbon" and the .so built with no complaints. However, once I installed it and tried to import it, I got this from Python: ValueError: module functions cannot set METH_CLASS or METH_STATIC What does this mean? I searched the mail.python.org list and saw a post back in April, 2004 from someone else who saw this exact same line, but nobody every replied to that message. More generally, I'd like to know the answer to this: How do I specify changes to the gcc lines that distutils runs when it builds? Is there a way (short of modifying distutils themselves) to specify optional and/or additional arguments to these commands? Thanks for any help or pointers! Dave Opstad

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How do you find the app that matches a creator type
by Read Roberts Jan. 31, 2005

Jan. 31, 2005

Now that mcfs.py is deprecated, what is an alternative for the now unsupported FindApplication?

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Implementing help
by Roger Binns Jan. 30, 2005

Jan. 30, 2005

For the BitPim project I currently use the wxWidgets way of doing help, authored using HelpBlocks. Behind the scenes it amounts to various HTML files dumped into a zip file and given a .htb extension. HelpBlocks also makes a Windows format help file (CHM) and I use the native Windows help api to load and display that help on Windows. I want to produce a tool that can take any wxWidgets format help file and transform it into a directory that can be used by the Apple help APIs (AHRegisterHelpBook and AHGotoPage). These are the steps I took in compliance with Apple's doc: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/ ProvidingUserAssitAppleHelp/index.html - Make a directory somewhere - Extract resources/bitpim.htb using unzip into that directory (you can find this file if you peek inside the standard download of BitPim for Mac) - Edit welcome.htm to add a tag in the head section: <META ="AppleTitle" CONTENT="BitPim help"> - Drag and drop the folder onto the help indexing tool. It is in /Developer/Applications/Utilities. (For some reason Apple go out of their way to ensure you can't run this tool from the command line). If I call AHGotoPage (which is the only API I want to call), the page displays correctly but the search widget does nothing and claims to be in a book (null). I couldn't figure out what to do to get AHRegisterHelpBook to accept the directory since Apple's doc helpfully leaves that information out. I assume some sort of directory structure is needed as well as a property list somewhere (the doc is vague). Note that I am not trying to put something within my application bundle. I just want a standalone directory with non-localised help content that I can use from an application if I happen to know where the directory ended up. And I want to be able to do this transformation from pure Python code (ie no dragging and dropping or using an interactive property list editor). As an alternative I would settle for an extra option to py2app where I can give the path of the .htb file and have it do the right thing. BTW I have found the Mac support in Python quite a bit harder to work with than the corresponding stuff for Windows (win32all). In particular most of the documentation is empty and there are no examples. Most of the APIs like to return MacOS.Error: (-50, 'error in user parameter list'). Things are more complicated by the corresponding C API documentation going on about types like FSRef and CFStringRef so I couldn't be sure if I was supposed to call some constructor in Carbon.CF or if it was fine just passing in Python strings. I am still not sure if AhRegisterHelpBook isn't working because I have the wrong types or because the underlying API doesn't like whatever directory structure and contents I am supposed to have but Apple didn't document. Roger

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How do I send appleevents to an external program
by Joachim Mårtensson Jan. 30, 2005

Jan. 30, 2005

Hello everyone. I am trying to figure out how to send appleevents to an external program. What I want to accomplish is to open a text document in a editor that supports the external editor protocol as described here http://www.codingmonkeys.de/techpubs/externaleditor/pbxexternaleditor.html. Here is my code so far, What am I doing wrong? _filePath is the path to the file and _lnnum is the line number where I want to place the caret. I am using PyObjc but no api in cocoa seems to exist so I use various other modules. def openInExternalEditor(self, _filePath, _lnnum): import aetools, struct editor = aetools.TalkTo('TxMt', 0) # TxMt = textmate a texteditor keyDirectObject = '----' keyAEPosition = 'sopk' _code = 'aeve' # kCoreEventClass _subcode = 'odoc' # kAEOpenDocuments SelectionRange=struct.pack('hhllll', 0, int(_lnnum), 0,0,0,0) _arguments = {} _arguments[keyDirectObject] = _filePath _arguments[keyAEPosition] = SelectionRange _attributes = {} editor.send(_code, _subcode, _arguments, _attributes) Thanks in advance Joachim Mårtensson

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Trouble getting TK to work
by Dave Kanter Jan. 30, 2005

Jan. 30, 2005

Forgive me if this question has been asked 100 times. I tried reading through past archives, honest I did. I'm having some trouble with Python and TK, but I'm not sure how to proceed. This is what I did: I'm using the version of Python that came with OSX -- version 2.3. I also downloaded TclTkAquaBl - 8.4.9.0 and ran the installer. Then I fired up Python, and typed: from Tkinter import * and then root = Tk() Which were commands I got from the Python book I'm working out of. This is what happened: >>>from Tkinter import * Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? File "/sw/lib/python2.3/lib-tk/Tkinter.py", line 3, in ? Tkinter provides classes which allow the display, positioning and NameError: name 'Tk' is not defined >>>root = Tk() Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? NameError: name 'Tk' is not defined >>> It seems to me it's an improper path configuration, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to get it straight. Any help would be much appreciated. Dave.

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