Luke’s $10k A Week Blog

Designing graphical applications can be tricky. When a program uses more than text — has images, windows, buttons, etc. — it has a Graphical User Interface. The Message Flasher I wrote recently is an example, yet it has the advantage of being written in TCL/TK. This makes it a breeze to write and understand, relatively speaking.

TCL/TK is a combination of TCL (a simple-to-learn scripting language) and TK (an extension that lets you access the windowing system and do graphical stuff). TK can be used in other languages too. Python, Perl, Lua, and C++ all have versions of TK available for them. To edit text documents, I like to use an editor named vroom that is written in Python’s version of TK, known as Tkinter.

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I have been a long-time fan of Opera. It is a great alternative to bulkier browsers like Firefox and IE, and happens to be the first browser to have discovered tabbed browsing.

However, I’ve noticed that it is getting bigger, and is closed source besides — so I can’t just hack in and fix whatever problem arises. Last version had a fatal flaw where the Wordpress rich text editor was concerned, so I had to upgrade to the 9.50 beta. Lately I have noticed it tending to hang for a few seconds on certain sites when I have plugins enabled. In any case, the lack of extensibility bothers me a little so I wanted to try something fresh.

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