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

Building macOS executables with cx_Freeze


As with Windows, we need to work around a couple of issues to use cx_Freeze on macOS.

First, there is a problem when building projects that include numpy, which is a dependency of matplotlib. To work around it, you'll need a version newer than 6.0.b1; at the time of writing, that means installing it directly from GitHub.

This can be done with by executing the following command line:

pip install --user git+https://github.com/anthony-tuininga/cx-freeze

The second issue only happens if you've installed Python using the homebrew package manager (currently, this is the only way to get Python working with Tk 8.6 on macOS). cx_Freeze expects Python to be in /Library/Frameworks where the official installer places it, but homebrew installs Python to /usr/local/Cellar/Frameworks.

This can be fixed with a symlink, by executing this command:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/Frameworks/Python.Framework ~/Library/Frameworks/

With the bugs sorted out, we can build binaries...