I'm pleased to announce the first widespread release of TclMacBag; a bag of widgets for Tcl on the Mac. The aim of this extension is to allow Tcl developers to produce Mac applications with a more Mac "look and feel", knowing their code will remain platform appropriate elsewhere. TclMacBag should be used in conjunction with Ttk/Tile rather than replacing it, and shares Tile's overall goal of being able to use one command and have it produce widgets which look platform native. Widgets in this release include: * combo: Recognising that Mac users expect to see menubuttons and attached menus where X11 and Windows users use comboboxes, this widget provides the correct variation to each set of users. * flatbutton: On Mac, presents as flat transparent button whose user image darkens when pressed. Elsewhere, a Tile button. * stylebutton: Primarily for toolbars. On Mac, there's a range of styles including 'pill' (seen in apps like Safari). Where appropriate, the buttons have variants for grouped button bars. On other platforms, they render as standard Tile buttons. * searchentry: Round edged search entry widget. This one also allows a user specified image to replace the standard magnifying glass. * helpbutton: This command presents a platform native appearance button for the end-user to launch contextual help. * colorframe: Much like a normal Tk frame, but, allows you to easily set a background colour for the Mac platform. On others, it creates a standard coloured Tk frame. * toplevel: In a tile application on the Mac a toplevel should be pinstriped. This widget provides that without doing anything unusual on other platforms. * text: This is a wrapper around the standard Tk text widget which provides Ttk/Tile focus styles, appropriate for whichever theme is active. * listbox: The same as the text widget but for the Tk listbox. Where it makes sense to do so, many of these widgets also support a '-force yes' option which allows the Mac variant of the widget to be used on non-Mac platforms. TclMacBag is Tcl-only, so should be able to be used on all major platforms. It's been tested most with Tk 8.4/Tile 0.7.8, but, has also been tested with Tk 8.5/Tile 0.8.x successfully. A TAP file is included for those creating starpacks with TDK. The extension is released with a standard BSD license. Homepage: http://tclmacbag.autons.net/ Screenshots: http://tclmacbag.autons.net/screenshots.phtml

Torsten Berg <berg@typoscriptics.de> wrote: >> I'm pleased to announce the first widespread release of TclMacBag; >> a bag of widgets for Tcl on the Mac. > > This is great. I like it! This covers some of the code, I have been > using lately to make a croos-platform app look near-native on > different platforms. Hi Torsten. Cheers for the feedback :) > Have you plans for a widget, that covers the filter mechanism used in > Mail to create rules for mails? I really like the way, this widget > allows users to build rule sets. Handling that sort of thing is bit outside the scope of this package, I think. At this stage, I suspect most of the next phase of development is going to be directed toward bedding it down. I know how I use these widgets, but, not how others will :). > One thing, though. On the current Tcl8.5b3 (with Tile 0.8.0; some > older betas as well) the code will fail, because the 'style' command > now is 'ttk::style'. The same applies to tile::currentTheme variable > as well. This is now ttk::currentTheme. I'm not sure what's happening there re style vs ttk::style. I know Joe English tried TclMacBag out this morning and didn't run into that problem. It may be that the version he's working with has ttk imported into the global space? (Also, generally, if you're reading and have grabbed v0.06 and use Tile 0.7.8 or earlier, it's an idea to grab v0.07. A last minute typo made it into the v0.06 searchentry widget which will affect you.)

Mats <matsben@gmail.com> wrote: > The stylebuttons in particular look very good, except for one thing: > you are using gifs in order to be independent of any extra packages, > but perhaps you could also provide the png images. The anti-aliasing > is a must these days. Definitely a job for someone with Photoshop skills. I chose GIF as it was the most manageable format for me. If others contribute better quality PNG images, I'll be happy to look at using them. > Also, it would be good to be able to have radio/check buttons with the > stylebuttons style. Having them in a row seems common use. An interesting suggestion. Cheers.