Book Image

Raspberry Pi cookbook for Python programmers

Book Image

Raspberry Pi cookbook for Python programmers

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Cookbook for Python Programmers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a graphical application Start menu


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.

Getting ready

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.

How to do it…

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):
  ...