i won’t repeat what i said here. i’ve since found a version of tcl/tk that works great on the mac.

eTcl. i’ve used it on windows ce, and even in the early versions it wasn’t bad. now there’s a version of it for mac os x. the installer worked, and writing up a quick gui ran the first time without a hitch. no fiddling around, it just worked. like it’s supposed to.

it’s not a “batteries included” version like the activestate version, but it works well enough to do prototyping in, or even a quick gui utility. even works with the starpacks.

which i think is a technology the tcl/tk people should just give up on. starpacks (and the name is dumb also) give you the ability to turn your tcl/tk program (with extension if need be) into a single file executable (which is only really necessary on windows). problem is you have to hunt down the step by step instructions for doing so. it’s direct competition is freewrap which works great, and is what i used to deliver tkblog for windows.

freewrap was a bit to crashy on the mac, works and feels more like an early beta. but still easier to work with than starpacks.

so in case you’re keeping score at home the two things needed tcl/tk so that tcl/tk “just works” on the mac; one, a distribution that installs right the first time, batteries included would be great; two, some kind of packager that creates a mac .app file. until either of those conditions are met, tcl/tk just isn’t going to happen on the mac.

i suppose it’s possible i’ll get comments from those who have it working just fine on the mac. probably two or three people out there do. there is the potential for a ton of mac applications that could be tcl/tk.

yeah, i’m bitter.

there’s a great opportunity to show and tell people that programming on a mac is easy with:

button .b -text “Quit” -command {exit}
pack .b

fire it up and say “see?” right now you can mostly do that with etcl, so it’s a start.