Version 4 of Tk9

Updated 2006-07-19 21:13:48

George Peter Staplin 2006.07.11 : As the Tcl/Tk core team is taking their time with Tk 8.5, I've been working on my own Tk9 for a few months. It implements a window system using Tcl, and some C extensions from megapkg (megaimage, megaimagetk, structure). It has full support for alpha transparency in any widget. You can rotate windows, and every color in Tk9 consists of [list R G B A].

Features so far include (from megaimage):

  • antialiased line drawing using Wu's algorithm (full RGBA support).
  • rectangle drawing (full RGBA support)
  • rotation
  • scaling
  • arbitrary pixel put/get
  • getrow/putrow
  • and much much more! :)

NEWS

2006.07.19

I have a working prototype of freetypeext.so:

http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/implementation/software/demo/text_playground.png

Sample code that generated that is available here:

http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/implementation/software/demo/text_playground.tcl

I plan to add kerning support, so that the text has better spacing between chars. Also see the text_playground.tcl file for further features I want to add that will be required for things like entry and text widgets.

I've started on my second prototype of a grid manager in Tcl. It now has -columnspan, -rowspan, and -sticky.

http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/engineering/prototype/grid_proto_structure-4.tcl

A little work everyday adds up to a lot.

At the moment it uses megaimagetk's megaimage.frame (in the demo) for fast shared memory image display. Future performance will be even better.

I have a demo/prototype that you can drag around the windows in, and watch as the alpha transparency works flawlessly with the windows.

Here's an example of the Tk9 demo (prototype WIP):

http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/implementation/software/demo/tk9_demo.png

Download the demo (for x86 Linux (built in Debian Sarge)): http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/implementation/software/demo/tk9_demo.kit

Design Plans for Tk9 http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/documentation/plans/

Future Features

  • megaimage polygon code
  • a new grid manager implemented in Tcl (work in progress)
  • complete window.img and use it in the demo.
  • better handling of alpha transparency when dragging rotated objects in the demo.
  • port to a bare framebuffer and use it as an alternative to X11 (possibly via VESA support).

I'm open to new developers helping. Are any of you interested in a mailing list?