Purpose: you have one or more .tcl scripts which work fine when you 'source' them into a Tk interpreter (or a tclkit). Now you'd like to distribute or package these scripts as something that looks as much like a platform-native application as possible.
There are two things you might wish to do:
(i) interact 'natively' on the given platform
(ii) package the files nicely (so the user sees a single executable)
Now, there is lots of discussion on (ii) -- tclpro, tclkit, freewrap, etc are all attempts to solve this problem, but this page addresses the other problem, (i).
(i) may require the following (depending on the platform):
How can we accomplish these on all sorts of different platforms? In its simplest form, how can a user make a single .tcl script appear like a real application as much as possible?
Windows
On windows, any .tcl script can be double-clicked on to launch it with 'wish'. A nice icon can be added, not to the .tcl script, but to a shortcut which is created to point to the script (and that shortcut can appear in the Start menu) [add refs]. This accomplishes part of (A).
If we add a batch file, we can do at least some of (E).
MacOS
?? The 'drag n drop tcllets' allows you to make little applications quite easily. Does this do enough?
Unix
does this depend on whether you use gnome or kde or? In what sense can a shell script appear as an application?
MacOS X
This is largely like Unix, except that we want to look like a native macosx application with an icon, appear in the dock, accept drag'n'drop, etc.
What would be very nice would be a small generic application executable, compiled for each platform (like a small tclkit) which contains enough code internally to perform all of the above, and to allow you to change the icon, change registered file types/extensions, register itself with the OS, etc, AND which can produce, on demand, a modified copy of itself which you can use for your application. (If it could then, automatically perform some version of (ii) and bundle up a lot of others files at the same time, even better).
I envisage this, at least on Windows, MacOS (X), to be an executable that you run, and it pops up a Tk interface which asks you:
Then you hit 'go', and it creates a new executable 'yourapp.exe', say, which does all of the above.