ANNOUNCE: Toucan 1.0 - A feathered friend for the Palm
Mac Cody
integrated development environment (IDE) for developing applications
for the Palm OS using Ashok Nadkarni's PalmTcl 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 PalmTcl 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 PalmTcl 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 PalmTcl
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 1.0 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 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).
A distribution of Toucan 1.0 is available for GNU/Linux as a GZIP-
compressed tarfile:
http://home.attbi.com/~maccody/downloads/toucan-1.0.tgz
A distribution of Toucan 1.0 is available for MS Windows as a WINZIP-
compressed file:
http://home.attbi.com/~maccody/downloads/toucan-10.zip
Questions, comments, bug reports, and suggestions can be sent to Mac
Cody
at mac...@attbi.com.
Hope you enjoy Toucan!
Mac Cody
Chang Li
> Introducing Toucan - A feathered friend for the Palm. Toucan is an
> integrated development environment (IDE) for developing applications
> for the Palm OS using Ashok Nadkarni's PalmTcl interpreter. The main
> webpage for Toucan is at http://home.attbi.com/~maccody/
>
I am little confusion. How could you run Forms of Tk widget with
Tcl7.6 on Palm? How do you deal with the event and the callback in Tk?
Did you try the ARM processor from Palm? I guess the new OS will be
32bit.
That may be more easy to port Tk to Palm.
Chang
Mac Cody
>
> I am little confusion. How could you run Forms of Tk widget with
> Tcl7.6 on Palm? How do you deal with the event and the callback in Tk?
Let me clear this up. Toucan does NOT run on the Palm OS. It runs
on either a GNU/Linux or MS Windows computer. It just uses the Tk
widgets to model the appearance of how the Forms will look on the
PalmTcl application that does run on the Palm OS. Please take a
look at the online manual and example to see how Toucan works.
> Did you try the ARM processor from Palm? I guess the new OS will be
> 32bit.
> That may be more easy to port Tk to Palm.
I just developed the Toucan IDE. Askok Nadkarni developed PalmTcl.
It is a port and extension of Tcl 7.6 to run on the Palm OS. I
can't say whether PalmTcl will run on the ARM processor. I suggest
that you check out Askok's website for details.
Mac
Keiichi Takahashi
I've just built rpm of toucan-1.0 for RedHat Linux 7.2.
toucan-1.0-1bw.noarch.rpm and related RPMs fot PalmTcl programming are
obtained at the following URL:
http://bitwalk.s7.xrea.com/palmtcl.html
If you have interests, just try to visit! Thanks.
Regards,
Keiichi
--
Keiichi Takahashi, bitWalk Co.,Ltd.
mailto:bit...@nyc.odn.ne.jp
http://www1.odn.ne.jp/bitwalk/index.html
Chang Li
I like the idea to run Palm application with Tcl but no Tk.
SO it is good to have a native look and feel. I suggest that
Toucan may use a toolbar to reduce the use of the menu item.
Chang
Mac Cody
>
> Mac Cody <mac...@attbi.com> wrote in message news:<3C43BF87...@attbi.com>...
>
> I like the idea to run Palm application with Tcl but no Tk.
> SO it is good to have a native look and feel. I suggest that
> Toucan may use a toolbar to reduce the use of the menu item.
>
> Chang
>
The toolbar will come, eventually. The items currently available
in the menus are, for the most part, accessed only during initial
project setup (PilRC and par parameters, primarily). Those that
stand to be used more often (Load, Save, Palm resource generation),
will find their way to a toolbar.
Mac