16.9. Alternatives to Tkinter

Tkinter may not satisfy your needs. It isn’t particularly fast and isn’t a good candidate for games or for image-manipulation programs. Its high-level approach means that particularly unusual or specialized user interfaces may be difficult to implement. Or, you may not have the time to learn Tkinter. Fortunately, alternatives are available.

Three cross-platform windowing/GUI libraries stand out, being available for at least Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/UNIX. The first is the Qt package, which forms the basis for the well-done KDE desktop environment effort, a large project geared toward producing an integrated and comprehensive desktop environment for Linux/UNIX and compatible operating systems. QT is a rich and powerful GUI framework and also has QT Designer, a capable GUI builder. You can find out more about Qt at http://qt.nokia.com. Also, www.kde.org will give you a chance to browse screenshots of many applications built using KDE.