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

[Bob Ippolito <bob@redivi.com>]

On Oct 25, 2004, at 17:29, altern wrote:

> > > 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.
> that would be nice, but when is this gonna be real?
Ask them!  It's close enough for most purposes already.

> > 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 :)
> not in the commercial world, but it is on the academic world. Its a 
> great tool to experiment/prototype with graphics with a low cost on 
> coding and programming knowledge. For example, teaching multimedia 
> students (usually non technical backgrounds) to program in C++ can be 
> nearly mission impossible but this is not the same in Python or 
> Processing. I actually preffer and choose Python as i believe is more 
> apropiated for this goal.
I agree with that, but I'm not so sure that the Python toolkits 
available are quite ready for this task.  I do know of one successful 
endeavor of using Python for teaching this sort of course, but it uses 
a bunch of OS X specific technologies: http://drawbot.grafitron.com/

> The problem is that there is no library that combines different things 
> you need like easy grafics with pull down menus and other GUI widgets 
> like dialogues, alerts ... We are actually working in this direction 
> to combine wxpython with openGL to create a framework for this. I am 
> not sure which direction will take but eventually you could use it for 
> anything like yo can do with processing. We are getting close and it 
> actually took a ridiculous amounth of time and energy compared to what 
> we expected it would take.
wxPython + OpenGL has little to do with pygame.. unless you're using it 
for sound or input events?

-bob