Python 3 and PyObjC

My main programming platform is OS X 10.8 and Python 3 (currently Python 3.3). In earlier blog posts I have discussed installing and using PyCrypto in this environment. My next attempt was to find a GUI solutions for this platform. I usually prefer native approaches when programming, and for OS X the Cocoa framework is the native approach. To get access to this from Python we need a bridge, and the bridge is called PyObjC. At the home page PyObjC seems like a dead project. But Ronald Oussoren is still doing some development, including Python 3 support. It is not straight forward to compile and install PyObjC for Python 3, but Giacomo Lacava provides the necessary steps. To summarize I have done the installation using the following steps:

1. Fetch the latest code from Ronald Oussoren:

   hg clone https://bitbucket.org/ronaldoussoren/pyobjc
   cd pyobjc

2. Compile and install PyObjC core:

   (cd pyobjc-core && python3 setup.py install)

3. Compile and install the Cocoa, CoreData and Quartz frameworks:

   for i in Cocoa Quartz CoreData; do
     (cd pyobjc-framework-$i && python3 setup.py install)
   done

4. Compile and install the rest of PyObjC (except the XgridFoundation framework):

   for i in pyobjc-framework-[^X]*; do
     (cd $i && python3 setup.py install)
   done

So far everything seems to work OK. You need Mercurial (hg) to perform the first step.