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Re: [pygame] Multimedia: was: Introducing Pygame Launcher alpha

On Oct 25, 2004, at 16:07, thor wrote:
You can do this on OS X.. pygame is more or less fully interoperable with Cocoa via PyObjC. Having pygame and Cocoa widgets in the same window would require a good amount of hacking due to the way that SDL works with the Cocoa backend, but should be possible. Separate (Cocoa-based) windows, menus, etc. is most certainly possible because I've done it before.
But here we loose one of the main beauties of Python, being cross-platform!
For a developer to be able to write the same code for each platform is fantastic.
It would be a dream to see Python develop that way. (with it's libraries such
as pygame).
Well, wxPython is cross-platform in nature, but it doesn't mean that the application you write on Windows will behave like a Mac application on the Mac. It usually ends up looking pretty ugly on the Mac at this point regardless of how hard you try. On the other side of the coin, Linux typically behaves close enough to Windows that a wxPython application developed on Windows will be acceptable on Linux. Linux users take what they can get for the most part :)

But hey! There is a world out there which is now being
occupied with Flash, Director, Java, Processing and could so easily
be won by the beauty, friendliness and opensourceness of Python.
I don't think that any current Python solution can really come anywhere near Flash or Director on any points other than price and development language.
Speed? I wonder if python/pygame shouldn't be much faster to do rendering than Flash or Director?
Although it couldn't probably do vectors as easily as Flash.
pygame isn't really that fast, it's entirely done in software. I would imagine it's equivalent or slower than Director.. it *MIGHT* be faster than Flash, but Flash does a lot more processing (antialiasing, scaling, etc.).

A pygame+Numeric equivalent to Processing is certainly possible, and wouldn't be a huge effort to develop, but it's certainly not there yet out of the box.
Well, the nice thing about Processing is that you can extend your Processing code with ALL the ability
of Java itself. Thus it is extremely wide environment if you're willing to go out of the Processing world
and enter the world of Java. And then you've got a cross platform environment that is quite powerful.
I have never seen a real application built with Processing that does any more than what you'd be able to do with pygame by itself.. though I haven't really paid any attention to it since its beginnings.

Messing around with PyObjC on Mac, trying wxPython on PC and I don't know what to do on Linux
just to make a cross platform application that draws something on a panel is quite cumbersome and not fun.
I feel like this is missing from Python, but I am sorry to say that I don't write C and can't do it myself.
It would be extremely interesting project though and should increase the popularity of Python enormously.
Just look at Processing.
wxPython is going to work nearly as well as Swing does cross-platform.. so that puts it more or less on equal ground with Java in the cross-platform GUI arena.

No C knowledge should be necessary to write a framework that provides you with an equivalent environment to Processing.

I don't agree that it would make that much of a dent in Python's popularity. The audience of a tool like Processing probably isn't as big as you think it is :)

-bob