wxForty-Two

Need any wxWidgets or wxPython Help?

Robin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:02:21 +0000

My current long-term consulting project will be coming to an end soon, so I am currently looking for some short-term paying projects to fill in while I'm looking for my next long-term gig. Anything ranging from a few days to several weeks worth of work would be fine. So if you would like some help with your wx-related projects, would like to have specific bugs fixed or new features added to wxWidgets or wxPython, or would like to sponsor some of my work on Phoenix, then please send me an email and we can discuss the details.

Of course if you have or know of a long-term position available that would fit my skill set then please let me know about that as well.

Thanks!

OS X Lion Was My Idea

Robin — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:35:38 +0000

Several months ago Microsoft had an ad campaign where they would have an average Joe or Jane talk about some cool wizbang feature of Windows 7 and how it was all their idea. It was one of Microsoft's better ad campaigns, and was actually understandable by the average person without requiring the viewer to know industry inside jokes, or to understand Jerry Seinfeld, to be able to "get" the gist of the commercial. It also employed some cute gimmicks, such as when the person was remembering back to how they thought up the wonderful new idea the directors used a different actor who was younger, thinner, cuter, handsomer, and had way better hair than the real person.

A few weeks ago I realized that I had the same experience with Mac OS X Lion. Way back in 2007 I wrote a post in this blog about some of the things that annoyed me about OSX. Two of them were finally fixed in Lion, and it only took 4 years! Here is the first one.

Can only resize from 1 corner

It bugs me that I can only resize windows from the lower right corner. I often find myself wishing that I could resize from any edge or corner as I've been doing for nearly 20 years on every Windows, OS/2 and X-Windows system I've ever used.

We can now grab any corner or side of most windows and resize the window by dragging the mouse cursor. Yay! For you non-Mac users out there, until you're not able to do that you may not actually realize how much you do it. For example, if you have a window that you would like to make wider and have it grow to the left, then on Macs running an earlier version of the OS you would first have to move the window to the left, and then you would have to move the mouse cursor down to the bottom right corner and drag to the right. That's lots more effort than it should require, and now, thanks to me, you don't have to go through all of that!

Can't change mouse cursor

You'd think that with how important the visual appeal of the OS seems to be with Apple that they would not have let something this ugly slide through their QA department for so long. Since I usually have multiple computers with multiple screens active at once, I like to increase the size of the mouse cursor a bit, or replace it with alternate cursors that are more easily visible. I've tried options for things like giving the cursor a comet trail of fading arrows behind it, or what not, and I hate them all after a few minutes. For me, just increasing the size and/or using a colored arrow that is easily visible does the job and doesn't get in the way of my work. However on Mac OS X you can't use custom cursors and all you can do is scale the image up in the Universal Access section of System Preferences. And being Apple you might assume that it would be a nice scaled up anti-aliased rendering of a vector image, but NO! They simply take the original 16x16 pixel image and stretch it to fit the new 64x64 or whatever size. Anyone who has used a photo editing application more than a few times knows you can't take a small image and enlarge it very much without it looking like crap! It embarrasses me too much to run a Mac with a cursor stretched up to a monstrosity like that, so I suffer with the itty-bitty one that occasionally gets lost among the dozens of windows on my desktops.

Next up is the lack of ability to have a nice looking mouse cursor that is larger than normal. At least that's the way it was prior to Lion. Now when you change the cursor size it scales up very nicely, probably because they are using some scalable image format now instead of a small 16x16 bitmap image. Unfortunately if an application uses some non-standard cursor images they are still poorly scaled up into a jagged edged ugly blob. Also unfortunately I haven't been able to find a screenshot program yet that will capture the new enlarged cursor so I can show you the difference. They all end up with the small default cursor in the screenshot instead. Weird. Anyway, I'm no longer embarrassed to have a larger than normal cursor on my Macs because they are no longer so dang ugly. Thanks to me you can also have a purdee big cursor too!

Now the only question remaining is who should Apple get to play the younger/fitter/handsomer version of me while filming the flashback parts of my "OS X Lion Was My Idea" commercial, what do you think?

Happy Towel Day!

Robin — Wed, 25 May 2011 21:08:14 +0000

Do you know where your towel is?

wxPython Roadmap Updated

Robin — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:37:15 +0000

After way too long since it was last edited, the wxPython Roadmap has finally been updated. Please direct any questions or comments to the wxPython-dev mail list.

wxPython 2.8.12.0 released

Robin — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:33:35 +0000

This is pretty much a big-fix only release, although some of the 3rd party modules in wx.lib have also been updated and include some new features. You can download it from the wxPython download page. As always you should join the wxPython-users group hosted at GoogleGroups for questions, support, comments, or just for the sake of being part of an awesome community.

Python Book Deals

Robin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 18:54:43 +0000

While browsing around on the Packt Publishing web site after looking at the page for Cody's book I saw that there are currently a couple promotional deals that may interest some of you. There is the Python Month deal that will give you 20% off any Python book they publish, or 30% off of any Python eBook. The other deal is that you can currently get any 5 eBooks from Packt for $40.

New wxPython Book

Robin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 18:35:34 +0000

The wxPython community now has a 2nd book about our favorite UI toolkit. The book is "wxPython 2.8 Application Development Cookbook" written by Cody Precord and published by Packt Publishing. Cody is the creator of the awesome Editra source code editor and a frequent participant on the wxPython-users mail list. There is an eBook version of the text available from Packt Publishing, and you can get the printed version from Packt or from other booksellers such as amazon.com.

I haven't read all the recipes yet, but from what I've seen so far I can say that they are informative and do a good job of explaining the demonstrated techniques and the concepts used or implemented in the sample source code. I think that there will be something for everyone in this book, from newbies all the way up to experienced users.

Congrats Cody!

Project Phoenix

Robin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 01:07:02 +0000

For a couple years now myself and a few others have been hinting that a totally new way to develop wxPython is possible and is just over the horizon. I'm happy to announce that the project is finally moving beyond the pie-in-the-sky stage and that development of the tools has begun. More details are available in the wxPython wiki, and you can join the discussion about the project in the wxPython-dev mail list.

wxPython 2.9.1.1

Robin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 01:06:00 +0000

The 2.9.1.1 release of wxPython is now available for download at http://wxpython.org/download.php. This is the first official release in the 2.9 development release series. There are lots and lots of new widgets and other awesome stuff that have been added since the 2.8 series, with more to come in future releases. A list of changes can be seen at http://wxpython.org/recentchanges.php. Also new with this release is a build for Mac OSX and Python 2.7 that uses the Cocoa API and supports the 64-bit architecture on OSX 10.5 and 10.6.

Various binaries are available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and also for OSX using the Carbon and Cocoa APIs, for Python 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7. And source code is also available at http://wxpython.org/download.php of course, for building your own.

Whyteboard gets noticed

Robin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:03:56 +0000

Whyteboard, a useful application written using wxPython for the GUI, was just noticed over at SourceForge. Congrats Sproaty!