ANNOUNCE: Toucan 1.1 - A feathered friend for the Palm
Mac Cody
Toucan is an integrated development environment (IDE) for
developing applications for the Palm OS using Ashok Nadkarni's
Palm Tcl interpreter. The main webpage for Toucan is at
http://home.attbi.com/~maccody/
Toucan is based on Tcl/Tk (of course!) and provides an
environment for developing Palm Tcl applications using Tk
widgets to give an approximate appearance to the Palm Forms
interface. It is not a 100% perfect look-and-feel (at least
with the initial version), but it is sufficient for the user
to design the Forms interface and create the Tcl scripts to
glue them all together.
The intent is that once the Palm Tcl application is developed,
the IDE will convert the relevant Forms interface elements
into a resource script file and place the Tcl glue scripts
into a separate script file. Once this is done, the resource
script file can be passed through Pilrc (version 2.8),
sourcing in the Tcl glue script file at that time. Finally,
par (version 00.05.01) will combine the binaries generated by
PilRC with the Palm Tcl library to form a Palm resource file
ready to download into a Palm PDA or Pose.
Toucan runs on both GNU/Linux/X Windows and Microsoft Windows
platforms, though current development is on Slackware Linux
8.0 with TclTk 8.3.2. Microsoft Windows users should upgrade
to Tcl/Tk 8.3.4 to avoid the tk_chooseDirectory bug.
Toucan is licensed under the same license as Tcl. Details
can be found in the file LICENSE in the distribution.
Here is a list of what Toucan 1.1 provides:
o Graphical creation of Palm FORM and MENU resources.
o Support for all FORM objects supported by PalmTcl 0.3.
o Drag-n-drop generation of FORM objects.
o Access to default FORM object properties via right-click
on drag-n-drop source labels.
o Repositioning of forms and form objects via mouse drag with
visual feedback of current coordinates.
o Mouse double-click on individual MENU, FORM, and FORM
objects displays a pop-up operations menu for access to
element properties, element deletion, and copying of the
assigned resource ID to the cut buffer for pasting to
your favorite text editor (useful for speeding up
PalmTcl script development).
o Dynamic modification of MENU, FORM, and FORM object
properties via dialog windows.
o Creation and editing of Palm launcher large icon and
small icon resource bitmaps. Jan Nitjmans' Img extension
is needed to support BMP file read and write.
o Creation of BITMAP[GREY|GREY16|COLOR|COLOR16|COLOR16K]
elements and their associations to BMP files. Support for
FORMBITMAP objects has been added to allow placement of
bitmaps onto the Palm display (new for Toucan 1.1).
o For some Form objects a default to AUTO on width or height
is set when corresponding slider is set to 0 (new for
Toucan 1.1).
o Entries on Form element and Form object dialogs which
reference other resources (namely IDs) are now pick lists
of ID values that are currently available. For example,
the Menu ID selection on the Form properties dialog is
disabled (or only one 'Null' entry) unless there are Menu
IDs to select from (new for Toucan 1.1). Note that this
causes some breakage of Toucan 1.0 project (.tpj) files.
o Setting of command line parameters for PilRC and par
utilities. Both utilities are required for use with
Toucan.
o Generation of PilRC script file (.rcp) and files
generated by PilrRC and par commands, with execution
feedback in a dialog window.
o Storage and retrieval of all resource properties, bitmap
data, and utility parameters in a single Toucan project
file (.tpj).
o The HTML-based documentation has been replaced with
documentation in PDF format (new for Toucan 1.1).
o Graphic icons are available for use with desktop
launchers (new for Toucan 1.1).
o New toucanLib1.1 library file to hold supporting
libraries.
A distribution of Toucan 1.1 is available for GNU/Linux
as a GZIP-compressed tarfile:
http://home.attbi.com/~maccody/downloads/toucan-1.1.tgz
A distribution of Toucan 1.1 is available for MS Windows
as a WINZIP compressed file:
http://home.attbi.com/~maccody/downloads/toucan-1.1.zip
Questions, comments, bug reports, and suggestions can be
sent to Mac Cody at mac...@attbi.com.
Hope you enjoy Toucan 1.1!
Mac Cody
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Keiichi Takahashi
Thank you so much for releasing nice IDE for PalmTcl, Mac!
I've just built RPM for the Toucan-1.1 on Red Hat Linux 7.2.
The RPM can be downloaded from the following URI:
http://members10.tsukaeru.net/bitwalk/download_linux.html#palm
or directly,
http://members10.tsukaeru.net/bitwalk/src/toucan-1.1-2bw.nosrc.rpm
http://members10.tsukaeru.net/bitwalk/src/toucan-1.1-2bw.noarch.rpm
Note:
You can also download RPMs for PilRC and Par from the same URI, in case
you need.
Regards,
Keiichi
--
Keiichi Takahashi, bitWalk Co.,Ltd.
mailto:bit...@jcom.home.ne.jp
http://members10.tsukaeru.net/bitwalk/