A GUI revisited, once more
A week before I left on my vacation, I spent a week running a conference on how to use our AMR code, Enzo. During this conference, the idea of a GUI for yt came up again, and my old thesis advisor (the head of a project of his own that's a GUI for analyzing Enzo data!) suggested I scale back my ambitions a bit and try to just replicate the GUI he has created, one step at a time -- and his enthusiasm about this was pretty contagious. So I spent a day doing that, and then some isolated work on planes afterward, and I ended up with a very simple Tkinter GUI that can open up multiple slices and look at multiple outputs at a time.
I'm calling it Fisheye, and so far it's still very small -- but I've been really enjoying browsing data and using it for very, very rapid exploration. The other GUIs I've posted about in the past have had their place (and they've all also been very small) and this actually draws on all bits and pieces that were developed for those GUIs! I'm not sure how long I'll keep playing with this on planes and buses, but it's been fun.
The part about this particular pass at it, and it really is only a little pass at it since it's under 400 lines of code, is that it uses Tkinter for the GUI. I've been polling the other yt devs to see where Tkinter is available and I've been pleasantly surprised that it has pretty good penetration at supercomputing centers. So maybe there's something to it.
I know I feel a bit better about it than anything else I've tried -- because it requires no additional dependencies, and it's pretty straightforward to write.
