I have the impression that this software can not support Perl/Tk scripts but only simple scripts that perform a task and maybe print something as an output.
No, it works with Tk scripts as well. I just downloaded, built, and installed Tk.pm in a local directory, then used Platypus to create a Tk "Hello World" application. (Mind you, it's a 10MB "Hello World," but that's the drawback to carrying a beefy library like Tk around in your app.)
I read that only 4 ways are available to direct the output of the program i.e. none, progress bar, text and web.
You'd select "output" as none in Platypus - they're really just talking about where to direct STDOUT/STDERR. The helpfile available from within the Platypus application gives more details.
One downside is that X11 isn't installed on OS X by default, the user needs to install it from their OS installation disks. Depending on your target audience, this may or may not be an issue, I suppose. It would probably take some clever fiddling about to have the app detect that X was missing and issue an appropriate message to the user.
Let us know how you fare!
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Thanks a lot for your kind help. Actually, your last reply made me realise a bigger problem than the ones I had. I hadn't realised X11 does not come pre-installed in MAC OS Xs. After doing some search, I saw there is nothing you can do to avoid X11, unless you use Tkx. So, I will either have to go with Tkx (that does not need X11 to run) instead of Tk or use Netbeans for my gui part and create apps for the non-gui Perl stuff I am using.
Really appreciate your help,
Athanasia
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Hi,
actually the X11 issue is not so hard to solve. X11 is part of the 'Optional Installs' package that comes on DVD/CD with every Mac. So you could give your users some instructions on how to install that. Also I've seen a few newer machines (OsX 10.5) which had X11 installed by default and even started X11.app automagically when the user opened my pp-packed Tk application.
Cheers, Christoph
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You're most welcome!
I hadn't heard of Tkx, myself - presumably that's talking to an Aqua-Tcl binary to bypass X11. Actually, that's kind of cool, I'll have to take it for a spin. :-)
As long as you're considering substantial change to your design, do take a look at the script I referenced earlier. It uses HTTP::Server::Simple and CGI for the GUI. Quick and dirty, but works like a charm.
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