Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By : Bhaskar Chaudhary
Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By: Bhaskar Chaudhary

Overview of this book

Tkinter is the built-in GUI package that comes with standard Python distributions. It is a cross-platform package, which means you build once and deploy everywhere. It is simple to use and intuitive in nature, making it suitable for programmers and non-programmers alike. This book will help you master the art of GUI programming. It delivers the bigger picture of GUI programming by building real-world, productive, and fun applications such as a text editor, drum machine, game of chess, audio player, drawing application, piano tutor, chat application, screen saver, port scanner, and much more. In every project, you will build on the skills acquired in the previous project and gain more expertise. You will learn to write multithreaded programs, network programs, database-driven programs, asyncio based programming and more. You will also get to know the modern best practices involved in writing GUI apps. With its rich source of sample code, you can build upon the knowledge gained with this book and use it in your own projects in the discipline of your choice.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Getting started

Our goal here is to build a programmable drum machine. Let's call it the Explosion Drum Machine.

The drum machine will let the user create an unlimited number of beat patterns using an unlimited number of drum samples. You can then store multiple riffs in a project and playback or edit the project later on. In its final form, the drum machine would look like the following screenshot:

To create your own drum beat patterns, simply load some drum samples (which can be any audio file with a .wav or .ogg extension) using the buttons on the left. You can design your beat patterns by clicking on the buttons on the right.

You can decide the number of beats per unit (BPU). Most western beats have 4 BPU, a Waltz would have 3 BPU, and some Indian and Arabic rhythms that I composed on this machine had 3-16 BPU! You can also change the beats per minute (BPM), which in...