Re: Tk in comparison to other portable toolkits

Keith Nash wrote:
I'm intrigued by the capabilities of Enlightenment 17 (E17), particularly
its animations and transparency. E17 is now sufficiently mature to be the
default desktop environment for Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 on the Sony
Playstation 3.

The easiest way to try E17 is to get the live CD, as the build procedure is
rather complicated. The most striking item on the CD is an OS-X-like
animated taskbar (though unfortunately it is not configured as the default,
you have to switch it on).


I managed to build it with a Tcl script. I kid you not. I created a
script called evolve.tcl and had it run through build permutations until
it found the right pattern to build the snapshots.

Some of it is interesting. I suspect I missed the full effect though.


E17 and its libraries might be of interest to Tclers because
* they use the BSD License
* they provide state-of-the-art 2D graphics, including animation,
transparency, and theming
* they try to be lightweight, with useful components placed in libraries
that can be re-used by other projects

In particular, the Enlightenment libraries are quite mature, and are the
result of literally years of effort by capable coders. If we want a
BSD-licensed 2D graphics toolkit with animation and transparency, it would
take us a long time to produce anything as good as this.

I agree it will take time, but E17 isn't finished yet from what I
gather. And it's over 50,000 lines of code and growing.

I will look more at the sources, but to be honest I've had bad
experiences with the Rasterman's past efforts with E. I tried using E
several years ago, and it was too unstable for everyday use. However, I
don't want to judge his project based on that for the rest of my life.
Hopefully he's learned some better ways, just as I have to build quality
software.

The project is intended to be cross-platform, but I have not attempted to
use its Win32 or OS X variants.

More info: http://wiki.tcl.tk/17329

Thanks for sharing that.

I have videos of Whim2 powered by NexTk, and a custom backing server.
It has some capabilities that others don't have yet, and also a problem
or 2 that I'm still working on.

Here's an early video of Whim2 using NexTk (hosted on sriv's server):
http://server.linuxsys.net/images/Whim2_awesome.ogg

I have some other better and more exciting movies that I'll talk with
sriv about hosting.

That's all software alpha blending and rendering. It's based on copying
the backing server framebuffer that is mmaped with MAP_SHARED, so it's
basically shared memory. It's pretty fun, but there are some challenges
to work out. Especially with regard to how large apps think the desktop
is with the portable X server I wrote called backing_server.


George
.

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