Toucan 1.2 (a feathered friend for the Palm)

Toucan is based on Tcl/Tk (of course!) and provides an environment for developing Palm Tcl applications using Tk widgets to give an approximate appearance to the Palm Forms interface. It is not a 100% perfect look-and-feel (at least with the initial versions), but it is sufficient for the user to design the Forms interface and create the Tcl scripts to glue them all together.

The intent is that once the Palm Tcl application is developed, the IDE will convert the relevant Forms interface elements into a resource script file and place the Tcl glue scripts into a separate script file. Once this is done, the resource script file can be passed through Pilrc (version 2.8), sourcing in the Tcl glue script file at that time. Finally, par (version 00.05.01) will combine the binaries generated by Pilrc with the Palm Tcl library to form a Palm resource file ready to download into a Palm PDA or Pose.

Toucan runs on both GNU/Linux/X Windows and Microsoft Windows platforms, though current development is on Slackware Linux 8.0 with TclTk 8.3.4.

Toucan is licensed under the same license as Tcl. Details can be found in the file LICENSE in the distribution.

Here is a list of what Toucan provides:

Current documentation is in the form of a manual in Abobe Acrobat (.pdf) format. It can be found in the Toucan 1.2 distributions.

Files on CDROM

A copy of the paper Toucan: A feathered friend for the Palm in Abobe Acrobat (.pdf) format can be obtained here. This paper was presented at the 9th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference in Vancouver, B.C., Canada on September 19, 2002.
Toucan 1.2.1 in a gzipped tar archive for GNU/Linux (and other Un*xes) can be obtained here.
Toucan 1.2.1 in a pkzip archive for Microsoft Windows can be obtained here.
Palm Tcl 0.4 in a pkzip archive can be obtained here. Note that this archive contains pre-compiled binaries of the PilRC and par utilities for Microsoft Windows.
A source code distribution of PilRC 2.8 in a gzipped tar archive can be obtained here.
A source code distribution of par 0.05.01 in a gzipped tar archive can be obtained here.

Feedback

Feedback and suggestions for new features for Toucan are invited. Be aware that development is still ongoing. New features and bug fixes are in the works. New versions of Toucan will be made available as time allows. You can send your emails to maccody@home.com. Replace "home" with "attbi" for all you non-spammers!

Links

The ActiveState Tcl website.
Ashok Nadkarni, developer of Palm Tcl, has a SourceForge site.
Home page of Jan Nitjmans, developer of the Img extension.
Home page of George Peter Staplin and the ctext megawidget.
Home page of Aaron Ardiri and the PilRC utility.
Home page of David Williams and the par utility.
The Palm OS Developers webpage.

© 2001, 2002 Mac A. Cody

Last updated Wednesday, August 21, 2002