Subject: Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links (Dec 11)
From: Tcl-URL
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:19:09 +0000
To: "Tcl-URL distribution" :;
CC:
Newsgroups: comp.lang.tcl

QOTW:
    Well, desinformation *must* leave out the newest 
    facts. If that doesn't help, it has to leave out 
    even older facts, too.  Jan Kandziora on c.l.t
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/msg/46ddd50caa39f1d6

    I disagree. I give my opinion on all sorts of things all 
    the time without finding out about them. The difference is, 
    I'm usually right. Hrmhaha, Donal K. Fellows on c.l.t
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/msg/d552f34af33dc464


POT3W:
    ANNOUNCE: Tcl/Tk 8.5b3 RELEASED
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/3dbcd1a97547af1b
    Downloads:
	http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.html
    Homepage:
	http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10894

    ANN kbs 0.1
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/fd09885fa7813a78
    The system can generate [Tclkit Lite] executables and 
    Tcl packages for different operating systems. Tested are Linux, 
    SunOS, Windows and Irix. 
    Homepage as Tclkit Lite:
	http://www.equi4.com/tclkit/tclkitlite.html 
    Documentation:
	http://wiki.tcl.tk/18146
    Downloads:
	http://sourceforge.net/projects/kbskit

    ANNOUNCE: TclMacBag 0.06
	ttp://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/dcd475e9b0e2881f
    I'm pleased to announce the first widespread release of TclMacBag; 
    a bag of widgets for Tcl on the Mac. 
    The aim of this extension is to allow Tcl developers to produce Mac 
    applications with a more Mac "look and feel", knowing their code will 
    remain platform appropriate elsewhere. 
    TclMacBag should be used in conjunction with Ttk/Tile rather than 
    replacing it, and shares Tile's overall goal of being able to use one 
    command and have it produce widgets which look platform native. 
    Widgets in this release include: 
    * combo: Recognising that Mac users expect to see menubuttons 
      and attached menus where X11 and Windows users use comboboxes, 
      this widget provides the correct variation to each set of users. 
    * flatbutton: On Mac, presents as flat transparent button whose 
      user image darkens when pressed. Elsewhere, a Tile button. 
    * stylebutton: Primarily for toolbars. On Mac, there's a range of 
      styles including 'pill' (seen in apps like Safari). Where 
      appropriate, the buttons have variants for grouped button bars. On 
      other platforms, they render as standard Tile buttons. 
    * searchentry: Round edged search entry widget. This one also 
      allows a user specified image to replace the standard magnifying 
      glass. 
    * helpbutton: This command presents a platform native appearance 
      button for the end-user to launch contextual help. 
    * colorframe: Much like a normal Tk frame, but, allows you to 
      easily set a background colour for the Mac platform. On others, 
      it creates a standard coloured Tk frame. 
    * toplevel: In a tile application on the Mac a toplevel should be 
      pinstriped. This widget provides that without doing anything 
      unusual on other platforms. 
    * text: This is a wrapper around the standard Tk text widget which 
      provides Ttk/Tile focus styles, appropriate for whichever theme is 
      active. 
    * listbox: The same as the text widget but for the Tk listbox. 
    Where it makes sense to do so, many of these widgets also support a 
    '-force yes' option which allows the Mac variant of the widget to be 
    used on non-Mac platforms. 
    TclMacBag is Tcl-only, so should be able to be used on all major 
    platforms. It's been tested most with Tk 8.4/Tile 0.7.8, but, has 
    also been tested with Tk 8.5/Tile 0.8.x successfully. 
    A TAP file is included for those creating starpacks with TDK. The 
    extension is released with a standard BSD license. 
    Homepage:    
	http://tclmacbag.autons.net/ 
    Screenshots: 
	http://tclmacbag.autons.net/screenshots.phtml

    ANN: mactoolbar and aquahig
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/c0f4037c950e6fac
    The mactoolbar package is designed to emulate the standard Cocoa toolbar 
    provided on OS X. On the Mac, toolbars behave a bit differently than 
    they do on Windows or X11; rather than having the entire button darken 
    when pressed, only the image and/or text darkens, and the toolbar itself 
    can be hidden or made visible with a button-click. As such, the usual Tk 
    approach to toolbars (arranging Tk or Tile buttons in a frame) requires 
    a bit of customization. The mactoolbar package uses a Tile frame, 
    labels, and bindings to implement a Cocoa-style toolbar. 
    More information: 
	http://tk-components.sourceforge.net/mactoolbar/ 
    The Aquahig Package 
    The aquahig package implements some Mac OS X-specific configurations to 
    selected Tk megawidgets to make them better fit in visually with Mac 
    interface conventions, similar to iTunes and other Mac applications. 
    Currently supported widgets are the BWidgets Tree, the BWidgets ListBox, 
    and Tablelist. 
    More information: 
	http://tk-components.sourceforge.net/aquahig/ 
    Both packages are available under the standard Tcl/Tk BSD-style license.
	
    A NexTk Demo (an image viewer)  by Georg Peter Staplin
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/288c022cbe19dd92
    This is a demo of NexTk for Linux and Win32: 
	http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/implementation/software/demo/NexTk_image_viewer_937.kit
    This demonstrates ntk_panedwindow, ntk_listbox, ntk_grid, ntk_scrollbar, 
    ntk_button, ntk_label, and the rendering capabilities. 
    Directions: 
      Mouse button 1 is for panning an image.  Click and drag to pan. 
      Mouse button 2 rotates an image.  Click once for a 90 degree rotation.   
      Click twice for 180 degrees of rotation, and so on.   
      Rotations in NexTk from [-360,360] are possible as well. 
      Mouse button 3 scales an image.  Click 3, drag until you like the size, 
      and release. 
    You can use the following tclkits to run it: 
    This is a Tk-less tclkit that I've tested and used for the demo in 
    Windows XP (Note: it tends to work better than the regular tclkit with 
    Tk): 
	http://www.equi4.com/pub/tk/8.5b1/tclkitsh-win32.upx.exe 
    This is what I use for testing in Ubuntu Linux: 
	http://www.equi4.com/pub/tk/8.5b1/tclkit-linux-x86.gz 
    The Win32 demo has a bit of a problem on exit with cleanup_instance.  I 
    would appreciate review and advice with the Win32 paths.  The Win32 code 
    I also suspect could be made to be faster, so that it operates as 
    smoothly as the X11/Linux version.

    ANNOUNCE: freeWrap 6.3 released
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/94a009f81326dc8b
    The freeWrap program turns TCL/TK scripts into single-file binary executable 
    programs. freeWrap can wrap TCL/TK applications that consist of multiple 
    script and binary files. FreeWrap combines all the files together into a 
    single executable file. 
    freeWrap 6.3 is based on TCL/TK 8.4.16 
    freeWrap executables are freely available for both Linux and Windows. 
    Instructions and source code for building freeWrap on both Windows and UNIX 
    platforms is also freely available. 
    The following additional variations of freeWrap are also available for 
    download: 
	 freewrapPLUS        a windowing application that includes TCL/TK along 
    with the BLT, tkTable and sqlite extensions 
	 freewrapTCLSH       a console-only application which includes only TCL. 
    Homepage, Downloads:
	http://freewrap.sourceforge.net

OOBS:
    Calling all users of Tk_RedrawImage
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/3a19dd6321b6e50f

    How --enable-xft breaks backwards compatibility
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/549f7420c7efd74
    
MEET:
    Re: USENIX '08 Call For Papers Submissions Deadline: January 7, 2008
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/1440c6461d799e5/

ORBI: or what happened on comp.lang.tcl
    Tcl/Tk8.5 upgrade guide
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/278afed700e692c3

    Advice required BigNums in calculation
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/6266acbd6040a6b4

    Expect: how to tell if stdin is redirected from /dev/null?
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/79afc78d6fef0386

    Larry Wall, on Tcl ( V~~ )
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/6b4aac569dadaba8

    Speeding up recursive directory traversal
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/b7614540e121e7d4


TIPX: new, used and discarded Tips
    nothing new here, walk on.

OOTW: Orphan of the week or questions nobody answered yet:
    Anybody use RRD & TCL together?
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/acd6c04fca1fe53c

    loading expect package in a Windows xp service
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/e3ef77483b748d62

ATTC: At the Core:
    [TCLCORE] Ordered Dicts?
	http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/tcl-core/3582520

    [TCLCORE] Countdown to Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 releases
	http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/tcl-core/3587320
	http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/tcl-core/3587621

PMAG: Tcl in printed and other Media:
    Larry Walls State of the Onion 11 mentions Tcl.
	http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html
    Noticable is that even bright people rarely revisit 
    the observations they have made in the past.
    
    pthread_atfork handler - what can they do?
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.programming.threads/msg/3a43122820983fde
    

Thanks for Arjen Markus for his weekly summary of Wiki action:
  Just a few more days and Tcl 8.5.0 will be out officially.
  In the meantime the Wiki is receiving more and more examples
  that more or less require version 8.5, so this may be a good 
  time to look at it.
  
  A picture says more ...
  - Jolly nice to see those curves in 3D - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/14096>
  
  - And as it is the time of the year for contemplation ... here's 
    a classic: <http://wiki.tcl.tk/20464> (requires 8.5)
  
  Statistical contemplations
  - Here is a page on the Poisson distribution with various
    implementations for good measure - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/15132>
  
  - Should you not like the statistical properties of our good
    old rand() function, you can improve them: <http://wiki.tcl.tk/1551>
  
  - And for all of you who want even more statistics: the Gamma
    distribution: <http://wiki.tcl.tk/20463>
  
  Tcl 8.5, Mac OSX and food for thought
  - Prepare yourself for 8.5: reflected channels are now in the core
    - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/17594>
  
  - A HOWTO on standalone applications for the Mac OSX - 
    <http://wiki.tcl.tk/12945> with a nice little tutorial.
  
  - We are so used to creating recursive algorithms that we might
    be blind to another possibility: use such an algorithm to 
    construct linear code and gain performance -
    <http://wiki.tcl.tk/20469>
  
  
Everything Tcl-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in these
pages:
    The "Welcome to comp.lang.tcl" message by Andreas Kupries
        http://www.purl.org/net/tcl-welcome
    comp.lang.tcl is a crucial resource for Tcl practitioners.
    An interesting perspective on its traffic appears at
        http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/about

    The Tcl Developer Site is Tcl's "home base".
	http://www.tcl.tk

    Larry Virden maintains a comp.lang.tcl FAQ launcher.
        http://www.purl.org/NET/Tcl-FAQ/

    The Tcl Developer Xchange is a highly organized resource center
    of documents and software with provisions for individuals to
    maintain references to their own software:
        http://www.tcl.tk/resource/
    The TDX sponsor, ActiveState, also keeps info to convince your
    boss Tcl is a good thing
        http://www.tcl.tk/scripting/

    The Tcl'ers Wiki is a huge, dynamic, collaboratively edited repository
    of documentation, examples, tutorials and pontifications on all things 
    Tcl.
        http://wiki.tcl.tk/0
    For the ideal overview of the topics about Tcl most likely to
    interest a newcomer, see "Arts and Crafts ..."
        http://wiki.tcl.tk/969
    There's also a high-quality Wikibook on Tcl:
        http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Tcl

    ActiveState maintains binaries distribution and development tools
        http://www.activestate.com/Tcl
    along with a Cookbook of Tcl recipes
        http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Tcl

    "La Gazette du Técleux" is an important monthly publication.
	http://wfr.tcl.tk/1159

    deli.cio.us presents an intriguing approach to reference commentary.
    It already aggregates quite a bit of Tcl intelligence.
        http://del.icio.us/tag/tcl

    Cameron Laird tracks several Tcl/Tk references of interest (but
    needs to validate many of the links).
        http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.lang.tcl/

    Years ago, Cetus Links maintained a Tcl/Tk page with verified links
        http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_tcl_tk.html

    "Yahoo! Groups" archives comp.lang.tcl.announce posts--even 
    though clta itself is dormant.
        http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcl_announce/

We're working on more useful archives of past installments.  In the
meantime, an alternative is
  http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Tcl-URL&as_ugroup=comp.lang.tcl

Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.

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