2011/8/25 Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika@yahoo.com>

----- Original Message -----
> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@artengine.ca>

> To: András Murányi <muranyia@gmail.com>
> Cc: pd-list <pd-list@iem.at>
> Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2011 3:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [PD] notes/questions from a beginner
>

> On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, András Murányi wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 23:10, Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>> * has anyone used tkzinc? On the one hand, all the new feature requests
> I've seen for future versions of tk canvas have the caveat that they are
> already implemented in
>> tkzinc, (item grouping, transparency, full text rotation, etc.) but it
> seems like an unmaintained library at this point.
>>
>> It does seem unmaintained but to what extent is it unfinished/buggy?
>
> The biggest problem with TkZinc is not what looks like unfinished stuff or bugs,
> it's that although its API looks a lot like the TkCanvas that Pd uses,
> it's not compatible enough.

I think I must have sent my last message only to András,

my bad

but I looked around at the
tkzinc demos and found at least one obvious bug in the latest version. Additionally there
was documentation that said rotation would work without using opengl, but on two
machine I experienced a crash with the corresponding demo if I compiled without
enabling gl support. (Worked fine with opengl enable, though.)

That's why I thought i may have been a configuration problem (not you messing it up but an outdated configure script), because I suppose the output is the same in both cases, it's just handled by a different library - when not direct opengl, mesa trying to emulate it (if i'm understanding mesa right)
Anyway, it is a bug

Additionally, one of the demos showing off graphics interaction and transparency was
_extremely_ sluggish just moving a few rectangles around on the screen. Add to that
another of the demos showing an air traffic control interface where the interval between
graphics updates was about 1sec, and I would say I don't think the tkzinc canvas
was designed with efficiency in mind.

I don't even know why that stuff was advertised as proof of performace... the famous tiger is a lot more curves and a lot more movement.
I mean, i'm sure the air traffic stuff would be able to run 40 times faster (well, maybe i'll even try)

But the grouping stuff and sensitivity levels are very cool. As is the svg tiger.

All I could think of is adding these gems to the "Put" menu array dialog:

Array Properties

Name:
array1

Size:
100

[*] Save contents

Draw as:
[] Points
[] Polygon
[] Bezier curve
[*] Svg tigers

Put array into:
[] New graph
[] Last graph
[*] Svg tiger

Well, I'd say I wish a GUI toolkit which:
- is truly cross-platform
- provides standard widgets
- provides an equivalent of tk canvas
- can accelerate standard widgets (and, of course, anything else) by opengl
- fast at the backend