Book Image

Tkinter GUI Programming by Example

Book Image

Tkinter GUI Programming by Example

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a modular, cross-platform application development toolkit for Python. When developing GUI-rich applications, the most important choices are which programming language(s) and which GUI framework to use. Python and Tkinter prove to be a great combination. This book will get you familiar with Tkinter by having you create fun and interactive projects. These projects have varying degrees of complexity. We'll start with a simple project, where you'll learn the fundamentals of GUI programming and the basics of working with a Tkinter application. After getting the basics right, we'll move on to creating a project of slightly increased complexity, such as a highly customizable Python editor. In the next project, we'll crank up the complexity level to create an instant messaging app. Toward the end, we'll discuss various ways of packaging our applications so that they can be shared and installed on other machines without the user having to learn how to install and run Python programs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Updating our FriendsList class


The first thing we can do with our FriendList class is provide some sort of login system. Since each user has a unique username and real name, we can use these credentials to identify the user who runs the application. Normally, a system would also require a password, but we can skip that for this implementation.

In order to display the login screen to the user, we will need to take away the default behavior of showing the friends list straight away and instead display some widgets for the user to enter their details.

Open your friendist.py file again and begin by extracting parts of the __init__ method to a new one. Your new __init__ will look like this:

class FriendsList(tk.Tk):
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(**kwargs)

        self.title('Tk Chat')
        self.geometry('700x500')

        self.menu = tk.Menu(self, bg="lightgrey", fg="black", tearoff=0)

        self.friends_menu = tk.Menu(self.menu, fg="black", 
               ...