Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By : Bhaskar Chaudhary
Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

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, audio player, drawing application, piano tutor, chat application, screen saver, port scanner, and much 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, asyncio based programming 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.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Managing continuous updates

Next, we will update the position of the seek bar knob and the elapsed play duration, as shown in the following screenshot:

This is nothing but a simple form of Tkinter-based animation.

The most common pattern of animating with Tkinter involves drawing a single frame and then calling the same method using the after method of Tkinter, as follows:

def animate(self):
self.draw_frame()
self.after(500, self.animate)
Take a note of the self.after method, which calls the animate method in a loop. Once called, this function will keep updating frames once every 500 milliseconds. You can also add some conditions to break out of the animation loop. This is generally how all animations are handled in Tkinter. We will use this technique over and over again in several upcoming examples.

Now that we know how to manage animations in Tkinter, let's use the pattern...