[George Peter Staplin] 2006.07.11 : As the Tcl/Tk core team is taking their time with Tk 8.5, I've been working on my own Tk9 for a few months.  It implements a window system using Tcl, and some C extensions from [megapkg] (megaimage, megaimagetk, structure).  It has full support for alpha transparency in '''any''' widget.  You can rotate windows, and every color in Tk9 consists of [[list R G B A]].

Features so far include (from megaimage):
   * antialiased line drawing using Wu's algorithm (full RGBA support).
   * rectangle drawing (full RGBA support)
   * rotation
   * scaling
   * arbitrary pixel put/get
   * getrow/putrow 
   * and much much more!  :)

'''NEWS'''

''2006.07.19''

I have a working prototype of freetypeext.so:

[http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/implementation/software/demo/text_playground.png]

Sample code that generated that is available here:

http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/implementation/software/demo/text_playground.tcl

I plan to add kerning support, so that the text has better spacing between chars.  Also see the text_playground.tcl file for further features I want to add that will be required for things like entry and text widgets.

I've started on my second prototype of a grid manager in Tcl.  It now has -columnspan, -rowspan, and -sticky.

http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/engineering/prototype/grid_proto_structure-4.tcl

A little work everyday adds up to a lot.
----

At the moment it uses megaimagetk's megaimage.frame (in the demo) for fast shared memory image display.  Future performance will be even better.

I have a demo/prototype that you can drag around the windows in, and watch as the alpha transparency works flawlessly with the windows.

Here's an example of the Tk9 demo (prototype WIP):

[http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/implementation/software/demo/tk9_demo.png]

Download the demo (for x86 Linux (built in Debian Sarge)):
http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/implementation/software/demo/tk9_demo.kit

'''Design Plans for Tk9'''
http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/documentation/plans/
 
'''Future Features''''
    * megaimage polygon code
    * a new grid manager implemented in Tcl (work in progress)
    * port to a bare framebuffer and use it as an alternative to X11 (possibly via VESA support).
   
I'm open to new developers helping.  Are any of you interested in a mailing list?