Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By : Alan D. Moore
Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a lightweight, portable, and easy-to-use graphical toolkit available in the Python Standard Library, widely used to build Python GUIs due to its simplicity and availability. This book teaches you to design and build graphical user interfaces that are functional, appealing, and user-friendly using the powerful combination of Python and Tkinter. After being introduced to Tkinter, you will be guided step-by-step through the application development process. Over the course of the book, your application will evolve from a simple data-entry form to a complex data management and visualization tool while maintaining a clean and robust design. In addition to building the GUI, you'll learn how to connect to external databases and network resources, test your code to avoid errors, and maximize performance using asynchronous programming. You'll make the most of Tkinter's cross-platform availability by learning how to maintain compatibility, mimic platform-native look and feel, and build executables for deployment across popular computing platforms. By the end of this book, you will have the skills and confidence to design and build powerful high-end GUI applications to solve real-world problems.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Improving our application's cross-platform compatibility


Our application does pretty well across platforms, but there are some things we can do to improve it:

  • First, our application stores its preferences in the user's home folder, which is not ideal on any platform. We will fix our application to use the correct location on each platform for user configuration files.
  • Second, we're creating our CSV files without specifying any encoding; if a user inserted a unicode character (say, in the Notesfield), file saving would raise an exception and fail.
  • Finally, the current menu structure does not really come close to following any of the human interface guidelines we've discussed. We'll implement separate menus for each platform to ensure users have a UI that is consistent with their platform.

Storing preferences correctly

Each platform defines a proper location for storing user configuration files as follows:

  • Linux and other X11 systems store configuration files in a location defined in the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME...