[15 Feb 2004]
~ About:
The Tile Widget Set is an experimental reimplementation of
some of the core Tk widgets. The primary purpose is
to generate ideas for how to build the next generation of Tk,
when the asteroid strikes and we prepare for the 9.0 release.
~ Features:
+ A revised and expanded version of the TIP #48 style engine
+ Native look and feel under Windows XP
+ Native L&F under other Windows versions (almost working)
+ "Revitalized" look and feel under Unix
+ scrollbar, button, checkbutton, radiobutton, label, frame,
and labelframe widgets, plus a partial implementation
of the scale widget
+ new notebook and progressbar widgets
~ Compiling:
You have your choice of not one, not two, but three, count'em three!
separate build systems to try! One of them is bound to work for you.
Jeff's TEA3-based build system: "./configure ; make ; make install"
in the top-level directory.
Joe's build system: "./configure ; make ; make install"
in the "generic" subdirectory. Also TEA-based, just done differently.
MSVC users can also try 'makefile.vc' in that directory
(will need some hand-editing, 'make install' won't work).
Pat's build system (Windows): "cd win ; nmake -f makefile.vc",
or use the Developer Studio Project File "Tile.dsp".
You can also compile in a separate build directory with
Joe's or Jeff's system, if that's what you're into.
*** NOTE ***
The tile package requires access to a few Tk internal routines.
These have been added to the private stubs table for Tk 8.5,
but for 8.4 you will need to link against the Tk 8.4 shared
library directly (import library on Windows).
~ Available themes:
The tile package contains the following built-in themes:
+ "default", the classic Motif-style appearance
+ "alt", a "revitalized" look and feel similar
to GTK+'s default theme and Windows NT appearance;
+ "winnative", which uses the native Win32 API to draw widgets
+ "xpnative", which uses the Windows XP "Visual Styles" API
+ "step", an experimental playground for testing
out new ideas, such as NeXTStep-style scrollbars.
There are some other themes in the "demos" subdirectory:
+ "blue", another experimental playground used to test out
the pixmap engine.
+ "Aquativo", an adaptation of the GTK+ theme of the
same name. (Images are not included in the tile distribution;
see the instructions in demos/themes/Aquativo.tcl
for how to download them from the Gnome site).
Requires the Img package for PNG support.
+ "WinXPBlue", another imported GTK+ theme providing
a look and feel similar to Windows XP. (Again,
images not include in the tile distribution.
Also requires the Img package for PNG support.)
~ Roadmap for 0.4 release:
+ Documentation, documentation, documentation.
+ Get a Mac developer on board (Goal: see if the style engine
works as well for Mac OSX as it does for XP; implement
Mac-native theme).
+ User-definable custom styles, e.g. [checkbutton -style Toolbar]
to get toolbarish look and feel. (Goal: achieve Tk's current level
of customizability, surpass it if possible)
+ Possibly: add compatibility resources as necessary
to the various widgets (Goal: make it easier to switch
between tile widgets and standard Tk)
+ Tune and tweak the various themes (Goal: MSUE-compliance on
Windows NT, eye-candy-compatibility on XP, match Gnome's
default UI on X11)
+ Duplicate some of the common "unified" Gnome/KDE themes
like Mandrake Galaxy and Red Hat's BlueCurve
(Goal: "platform-native" look and feel on Linux, to
the extent that such a thing is meaningful)
+ Reorganize and refactor the internal data structures;
things are more complicated than they need to be.
+ Decide what parts of the API are fully-cooked, put them
in a stub table.
~ Availability
The tile widget set is currently hosted under the tktable project
at SourceForge:
<URL: http://tktable.sourceforge.net/ >
<URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tktable/ >
Sources are available under the 'tile' module in CVS.