The example in this recipe shows how we can define our own variations of the Tkinter objects to generate custom controls and dynamically construct a menu with them. We will also take a quick look at using threads to allow other tasks to continue to function while a particular task is being executed.
To view the GUI display, you will need a monitor displaying the Raspberry Pi desktop, or need to be connected to another computer running the X server.
To create a graphical Start menu application, create the following graphicmenu.py script:
#!/usr/bin/python3
# graphicmenu.py
import tkinter as tk
from subprocess import call
import threading
#Define applications ["Display name","command"]
leafpad = ["Leafpad","leafpad"]
scratch = ["Scratch","scratch"]
pistore = ["Pi Store","pistore"]
app_list = [leafpad,scratch,pistore]
APP_NAME = 0
APP_CMD = 1
class runApplictionThread(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self,app_cmd):
...