The example of PgAccess is a major reason why I incorporated these particular widgets in my applications: see this entry for an example of how I use them in my programs to implement Cocoa-style GUI's in my programs. The fact that PgAccess hardly looks like a Mac application doesn't mean much; the cosmetic aspect is actually the easiest one to deal with. Using more modern, Mac-style icons, setting colors and spacing accordingly, and you get very close to Mac conventions without too much effort.

I have considered using other widgets in my apps. BWidgets is not actively developed anymore, and it's quirky--some parts of it are powerful, such as the tree, but other parts of it are broken and nearly unusable. Tablelist is actively developed, and is one of the simplest-to-use and best-documented Tk widgets available--it has earned its considerable popularity among Tcl/Tk developers. However, it is most useful for simple list displays, and can't do certain things that other widgets can, for instance blending a tree and list display in the same view. (See the Finder for an example of how this works.) Also, both widgets are script-level (Tcl-based) widgets, and thus are slower than widgets coded in C, a compiled language.

TkTreeCtrl is an extremely fast, powerful widget code in C that can do just about anything you want, but it is enormously complex. (The tutorial for TkTreeCtrl is intimidating in itself.) TkTreeCtrl is widely used in commercial Tk applications with complex GUI's, but it is probably overkill for my needs; also, as a binary extension that requires compilation, it's not clear whether it will work with the forthcoming Tk-Cocoa branch of Tcl/Tk.)

Another, somewhat less complex widget is the ttk::treeview widget that is new in Tcl/Tk 8.5. It can provide a tree, list, and combination view, something that neither the BWidget or Tablelist libraries can. It also compiles just fine with Tk-Cocoa. However, the ttk::treeview widget lacks some important functionality that comes out of the box with Tablelist, such as sorting of data in the display. Tablelist supports this with a single command, but a developer has to add this to ttk::treeview. Also, ttk::treeview lacks visual cues to indicate when data is sorted, such as an up-or-down arrow in the column view. Again, Tablelist includes this out-of-the-box. Finally, it's not clear to me how configurable ttk::treeview is; developers' general experience with the ttk themed widgets is that they are great in their default values (they are designed to conform to platform conventions out of the box), but they are much harder to customize.

Given that I'm able to do nearly everything I want to with BWidgets and Tablelist, it's likely I will continue to live with their minor drawbacks and use them in my applications. And I trace that all back to PgAccess--homely on the surface, but clean and designed with care.

[/general] permanent link