[ubuntu-za] GUI programming in Ubuntu

[Simon Cross]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 9:34 PM, Neil Manson
<neil.manson at infotech.monash.edu> wrote:
>  What language/tools/IDE etc would you recommend for developing a small
>  GUI app?

If the app is really small then you can get away with Zenity (which
provides GTK dialogs from a shell script) [1]. Otherwise I'd recommend
one of the Python GUI toolkit wrappers -- PyGTK [2], PyQt [3], Python
wxWidgets [4] or Tk [5].

Personally I've used PyGTK and am relatively happy with it and Tk,
which I was also fairly happy with but whose look was less modern [6].
Other people use Qt and wxWidgets and seem to be happy with their own
choices. My impression is that Qt, Tk and wxWidgets are better choices
for supporting cross-platform (i.e. Mac and OS) deployments. GTK is
basically unavailable for Mac OS X at the moment [7]. GTK does fit in
nicely with my the rest of my desktop though.

[1] apt-get install zenity
[2] apt-get install python-gtk2 python-gtk2-doc python-gtk2-tutorial
[3] apt-get install python-qt4
[4] apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8 (Hardy may have a more recent version)
[5] included with Python.
[6] although it may have caught up again
[7] although that is slowly changing

Schiavo
Simon