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Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints

By : Bhaskar Chaudhary

4 (28)

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints

4 (28)

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, media player, drawing application, chat application, screen saver, port scanner, and many 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 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.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Meet Tkinter

1. Meet Tkinter

Objectives of this chapter

Installing Python and Tkinter

Importing Tkinter

GUI programming – the big picture

The root window – your drawing board

Widgets – the building blocks of GUI programs

The Tkinter geometry manager

Events and callbacks – adding life to programs

Handling widget-specific variables

Event unbinding and virtual events

Doing it in style

Some common root window options

Summary

2. Making a Text Editor

2. Making a Text Editor

Objectives of the chapter

An overview of the chapter

Setting up the editor skeleton

Adding a menu and menu items

Implementing the View menu

Adding a built-in functionality

Indexing and tagging

Implementing the Select All feature

Implementing the Find Text feature

Types of Toplevel windows

Working with forms and dialogs

Working with message boxes

The icons toolbar and View menu functions

Displaying the line number

Adding the cursor information bar

Adding themes

Creating the context/pop-up menu

Summary

3. Programmable Drum Machine

3. Programmable Drum Machine

An overview of the chapter

Module requirements for the chapter

Setting up the GUI in OOP

Finalizing the data structure

Creating broader visual elements

Loading drum samples

Playing the drum machine

Tkinter and threading

Support for multiple beat patterns

Saving beat patterns

Working with ttk-themed widgets

Summary

4. A Game of Chess

4. A Game of Chess

An overview of the chapter

Structuring our program

Modeling the data structures

Creating a Piece class

Making the game functional

Managing user preferences

Summary

5. Building an Audio Player

5. Building an Audio Player

An overview of the chapter

External library requirements

Program structure and broadview skeleton

Deciding the data structure

Creating the Player class

Adding and removing items from a playlist

Playing audio and adding audio controls

Creating a seek bar

One-time updates during audio playback

Managing continuous updates

Looping over tracks

Adding a tooltip

Summary

6. Paint Application

6. Paint Application

Creating a tiny framework

Setting up a broad GUI structure

Dealing with mouse events

Adding toolbar buttons

Drawing items on the canvas

Adding a color palette

Adding top bar options for draw methods

Drawing irregular lines and super shapes

Adding functionality to the remaining buttons

Adding functionality to menu items

Summary

7. Multiple Fun Projects

7. Multiple Fun Projects

Chapter objectives

Building a screen saver

Building a Snake game

Creating a Weather Reporter

Creating a phone book application

Graphing with Tkinter

3D graphics with Tkinter

Summary

8. Miscellaneous Tips

8. Miscellaneous Tips

Chapter objectives

Tracing Tkinter variables

Widget traversal

Validating user input

Formatting widget data

More on fonts

Redirecting the command-line output to Tkinter

The class hierarchy of Tkinter

Tips for program design

Tips for program optimization

Distributing a Tkinter application

The limitations of Tkinter

Tkinter in Python 2.x

Summary

Index

Index

Creating a Weather Reporter

Let's now build a simple Weather Reporter application. The Weather data for any given location will be fetched from the network, suitably formatted and presented to the user.

We will use a higher-level module named urllib to fetch Weather data from the web. The urllib module is part of Python's standard library and it provides an easy to use API to work with URLs. It has four submodules:

urllib.request – for opening and reading URLs
urllib.error – for handling exceptions raised by urllib.request
urllib.parse – for parsing URLs
urllib.robotparser – for parsing robots.txt files

With urllib.request, fetching the contents of a web page turns into a three-line code (see code 7.06_urllib_demo.py):

import urllib.request
with urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.packtpub.com/') as f:
    print(f.read())

This prints the entire HTML source code or whatever is the response from the web page http://www.packtpub.com. This is, in essence, the core of mining the web for data and information...

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