[Pythoncard-users] I'm back, current priorities

I'm back. It looks like we had 160+ downloads of release 0.4.5
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=19015
in the last two weeks, but as Andy mentioned in a previous email, the list
has been awfully quiet while I was away. If you are using the current
framework, have found any problems, or are waiting for a particular feature
to be added before you get active on the list, please share your thoughts
and issues with the list.

The TODO.txt file shows my current priorities as documentation, fonts, and
sizers.

There are a few people on the list that are supposedly working on
documentation, so I'll let them respond to the list to let us know their
status.

Based on the responses I got from the wx-users and wxpython-users mailing
lists regarding fonts before I left, I would like to leave fonts as is until
we can get some better support for determining the font family based on a
font face name. That means that the API for fonts will change in the future,
but any updates to user code should be minor. I'll pursue this issue on the
wx-dev mailing list.

I'm going to modify some more of the samples to use sizers and then start
some tests for adding sizers via the .rsrc.py files. I was quite surprised
to see that many of the people downloading the latest release got the
.tar.gz file which implies that they are running Linux or Solaris. Since the
current samples often look pretty bad under Linux because of the fixed
positions and sizes of the widgets, I would like to get some sort of sizer
arrangement working in the next two weeks. Any suggestions for an
implementation or help would be appreciated.

On a related note, I'm thinking of adding support for loading different
.rsrc.py files based on the runtime platform, so that we might have multiple
.rsrc.py files like minimal.win32.rsrc.py, minimal.linux.rsrc.py, and a
default minimal.rsrc.py that would be used if no other was available. The
pythoncard.user.config.py file could specify the user preference for which
to use which will simplify development testing of multiple .rsrc.py files.

I thought some more about a simple flat file database creator to further
test the back-end persistance mechanism idea. I will probably work on that a
bit and then let Patrick, Andy, and some of the other people that expressed
interest in that area expand on the idea. My current preference would be to
support random access, getRecord/setRecord and getField/setField style
methods, though with dot notation, both record (card) and field (widget)
would be attributes. In addition, the user will be able to turn on/off the
persistance mechanism, since apps like most of the current samples don't
really need automatic persistance. We can start a separate thread to go into
issues about data and metadata storage.

Finally, I'm going to spend some more time on the graphic.py module and wrap
up more of the underlying wxPython drawing capabilities.

If you have other issues you would like to see addressed or get a higher
priority, please post a message to the list.

ka
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Kevin Altis
al...@se...