Matben's blog

Mats Bengtsson, the founder of Coccinella, passed away on November 29, 2008. He was born in 1959 and had a very successful career in academics and specifically in his field of interest, theoretical physics. Early in school he distinguished himself particularly in mathematics and he even produced his own math books in primary school when his teachers were not able to help him further on. He graduated at Lund university as an engineer, continued as a research student in theoretical physics and presented his doctoral thesis, ”Parton showers in a phenomenological context”, at the age of 28 years. He spent a post-doc period in Germany (Aachen), but previously he had also been at the Cern laboratory.

Credit: freebird4, License: by-nc

There has been a lot of news in the Tcl/Tk community the last month or so, and I thought it's time to compile them here since Coccinella is written in Tcl. Tcl's windowing toolkit, Tk, has been "known" to be ugly and outdated. With the 8.5 release last December the tile package, now named ttk (Themed Tk), is included in the core which brings true native widgets on Windows (yes, Vista too) and Mac. Since Mac is my native platform, I can tell you that Tk beats both Qt and gtk, but perhaps I haven't seen the latest of them.

Just released is my tkpath package version 0.3.0 which for the first time brings a new canvas widget to Tcl/Tk which conforms to a more "modern" 2D drawing model found in SVG.

I have just removed the compatibility code for Tcl/Tk 8.4 in cvs, and Coccinella therefore now requires Tcl/Tk 8.5. Since 8.5 was released already in December last year I thought that five months should be enough to allow for people running Coccinella from sources to get a Tcl/Tk 8.5 installation.

The whiteboard in Coccinella has now come one step further to use SVG graphics. Well, it's not there, yet, but an important step has been taken.