I wrote a function that receives input as a string, modifies it, and outputs a string. I want to make it so that my non-computer savvy friends can use it, by adding a graphical user interface. I want something very simple: A box where they type in the text, a button that along with hitting "Enter," submits the text, and then a place where it displays the result after my function had modified it. I just want a way to receive input and to write output to a GUI in a way that a regular person can understand. I have no experience with GUIs.
Update
In the end I used XCode to create the GUI and PyObjC to pass the data from GUI to Python in a sort of "frontend-backend" setup.
You may be interested to get a look at http://zetcode.com/
there is a bunch of tutorial about wxPython, PyGTK and PyQt
It should guide you.
Jordi
Does your program have to be python? (as tagged) Your description sounds like a very straightforward task. In that case, have you considered JavaScript + HTML? Your users wouldn't need to download and install anything new, and most people have a good grasp of how to create/use web page forms.
If you're committed to a python implementation: There are a variety of different GUI toolkits (ways of creating the graphical user interface), but which one you choose will depend on how you want your program to look, what operating system you run on, ease of programming, and a variety of factors.
The widgets you describe are fairly simple (text box and button), and you might be able to accomplish your goals using Tk / Tkinter, python's "de facto standard GUI". The advantage of this GUI toolkit is that it's bundled with python on most operating systems, hence (so long as your friends have python installed) they're ready to go. If you don't have experience building complicated installers, then you'll find that users wander off when you require them to install a dozen modules on their own. The TK script would also run on any OS.
Convenience aside, the disadvantage of Tkinter is that Tk is a fairly old and limited framework in the form commonly found with python, and it can be painful to work with for more complicated programs. (some of the online tutorials have typos like mixed case or missing quotation marks) For your task, though, the basic layout and code are pretty simple: see the TkDocs site for a demo that you can adapt.
http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/firstexample.html
If you are familier with C# , than you can use IronPython,
just import the Form libraries, make simple form, by putting Lable, Textbox and Button, and refer to that textbox value on Button click. you can get the WOW Gui for Python, with IronPython
Ref : IronPython
Related
I am writing a text based game in python and as you'd expect, it has many questions with multiple answers e.g. yes/no.
I have been been using the usual, input your answer, answering technique, but I was hoping to make it a bit more interactive in answering some options, such as the main menu. I do not want a full on GUI but is there some way to have something similar to, for example, the modern BIOS menu, where you use the arrow keys to navigate, and press enter to select?
http://www.washington.edu/lst1/help/computing_fundamentals/troubleshootingxp/img/bios.gif
Thanks for any reply's, whether it's possible or not!
P.S. I would rather not have to download any plugins etc, because I have to be able to use this at school where I cannot use them.
This is a rather open-ended question (not have to download any "plugins")? But what you want is the curses library, to which Python has an interface with its curses module. The Python docs provide a simple tutorial for using it.
There is also a library called Blessings which provides a nicer, more modern object-oriented interface to curses. I haven't tried it but it's well supported and looks pretty good.
Take a look at the Urwid library: http://excess.org/urwid/
(I know you'd like to not use an external module, but that means you'll essentially have to reimplement most of CURSES yourself, and that's a road you really don't want to take)
I've decided to start working on a personal project, attempting to develop a cross platform, MSPaint like app. Oddly enough, I find mspaint is one of the applications I miss the most on Linux or OS X, so I want to try to make something similar. Tuxpaint, mtpaint, gpaint, etc. are all old and inactive and ugly. I don't want to make GIMP, just the basics, similar in features to MS Paint.
I'm thinking of doing it in python with the pygtk toolkit, but I was interested to hear your suggestions. Would C/C++ be a better choice, or even C# (gasp!) with mono? How about using Qt as opposed to GTK, or maybe some other fancy library I don't know about (Please, not FLTK!). I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
Thanks!
Qt's canvas object (or its newer replacement QGraphicsView) can do pretty cool things. Whether you choose C++ or python is a matter of personal choice, as Qt is supported in both languages. For a simple project like this I'd choose python because killer performance is not much of an issue, and it will be much easier to write.
Another thing to look into is making this app web based with HTML5's canvas object and Javascript. It can be surprisingly robust, and anything that can be put on the cloud is a win in most cases.
If you decide to go with Python (which would be my choice because it's such a simple language), then TkInter is considered the de-facto standard GUI package. That link should send you to some excellent starting references for TkInter, although I also really like Not_a_Golfer's suggestion of an HTML5 web-app.
Short: You can use both, no third party library is guaranteed to be distributed with all major distributions.
Long:
Gtk+ vs. Qt
What do you want incorporate into your application. If it is just selecting a brush, selecting color you could pretty much use any gui toolkit.
If you are going to run it as a web-based tool, Gtk+ has an html5 backend renderer (I don't know about Qt)
A sidenote:
I recommend to use the toolkit's native programming language (gtk+ C, Qt C++) - if you don't, you will suffer from delays with bugfixes, generally more bugs and delayed releases, though for that case it shouldn't really matter.
Everything else boils down to personal preferences and there already exist some questions to tackling that issue.
if you are using qt,you can use QtitanRibbon
We are in the process of standing up a UI on top of a python system. This is all throw away code, so we want something quick, yet presentable.
We will have a couple of "interfaces" but they will be of two types. One will be control, it will basically be sitting on top of a python thread, and accepting requests from the user.
The other will be more of a display screen that will need to be able to display images, and some classic "grid views" of text to the user.
We pretty much know we could* do all of this in HTML but wasn't sure what would be the best way to interact with the core python code?
Anyone know of a good UI python presentation layer? Since we know we can do all of this in HTML/Jquery pretty quickly, we are also open to suggestions on how to integrate this with a web server..
Any suggestions? Really interested in finding out if there is any way to use python as the back end to a webserver.
Let me know if you all need more information.
I like wxPython. The demo application is excellent and lets you browse, tweak and re-run the code right in the demo.
We have found the DJango meets our needs. It is a pretty slick mvc style python web stack. Really is easy to use, and very quick to develop in. I will say that the ORM layer is a little young so it is hard to do some simple queries, but luckly since this is throw away code we can just use native sql.
Tkinter is probably going to be the solution you can use quickest. Its API is simple and straight-forward, and you probably already have it installed.
As the other 2 classic Python GUI options have been given already, I feel duty bound to suggest PyQt :)
Using QT Designer I've found it much simpler than TKInter to get some basic GUIs up and running. Build your GUI up in a WYSIWYG way, then hook it up to the back-end logic. I've also found that the large amount of C++ help on QT available on the interent usually translates more or less directly across to PyQt. The resources available for TKInter are IMO pretty obtuse, and simply stop as soon as you want to do anything more interesting than Hello World. YMMV.
The Rapid GUI Programming with Python and QT book is a fantastic resource. Had me programming real applications in no time.
Curious if there are any higher level frameworks that attempt to wrap Tkinter? For example, wxPython is wrapped by the Dabo framework (http://dabodev.com/) and PythonCard.
Motivation: We've recently moved to Python 2.7 (Windows) and are very impressed with the new ttk (Tile) support which allows one to build professional quality, platform native GUI's using the built-in Tkinter framework. In the past we would have used wxPython to create simple GUI interfaces for our command line utilities, but we're re-thinking this strategy in favor of using Tkinter/ttk for these use cases.
We're new to Tkinter (coming from wxPython) and while Tkinter/ttk seem to be simple to use, there seems to be a lot of repeated boilerplate code that we're writing. Before we try to wrap up some of our code in a home made set of classes, I want to make sure that we're not re-inventing the wheel.
Probably a little bit late for you. But I've just released a tkinter framework in beta called tKroopy. Which aims to provide a means for switching between dialogs and provide some higher level widgets, like easily displaying tabulated data.
It was designed for building lots of small to medium applications and grouping them together in a single application, but there is no reason why you couldn't use it to build a single large scale application too.
https://github.com/tKroopy/tkroopy
The only one I knew about seems quite stale, Python megawidgets.
You can find a list of others on the Tkinter wiki.
tkRAD supports python 2 and 3 and looks mature
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tkRAD/1.6.5
I am not sure if my question title makes sense to you or not. I am seeing many cool applications which have cool animations/effects. I would like to learn how to use python to create this kind of GUI applications under Linux.
"cool animation/effects" like 3D wall in Cooliris which is written in flash and compiz effects with opengl.
I also heard of some python GUI library like wxPython and pyQT. Since I am completely new to python GUI programming, can anyone suggest me where to start and what I should learn to achieve and create such application? maybe learn pyQT with openGL feature? pyopengl binding? I have no clue on where to start. thank you very much for your time and suggestion.
By the way, in case if someone need to know which kind of application I am going to create, well, just any kind of applications. maybe photo explorer with 3D wall, maybe IM client, maybe facebook client etc...
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Python
Many KDE styles use SVG and plenty of animation. The user can always change themes. I think you should be more specific about what kind of animations you want to do. I don't think 3D wall type affects really fall into the widget category that QT is. It sounds to me like you want to make a 3D interface for an application. If that is the case, you may want to look more into 3D engine type libraries used mainly in games. I know that some have excellent GUI widgets for programming game menus and the like. I guess you'd decide on your engine and the see if there are python language bindings. One of my favorite engines: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/links.html
Another thing you would want to consider is how you want to handle the window management. Do you want to make a full screen interface? Or is to to be windowed? Also how would such an application integrate into a 3D window manager or rather a window manager with compositing.
Edit:
In that case the qtopengl module is probably something to look into: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/qtopengl.html
I do recommend QT. It's clean and easy to use and cross platform. So your app could run on windows as well.
One thing you'd want to think about before hand is the type of FX you want to perform. For example, if you want to create a page curl type effect when renaming the image, you'd have to think about how to program that, or look for libraries/code snipets that do that math. 3D engines that are used in games often have a lot of support for those kind of typical FX or animations that you'd see in a game. If you use something like qtopengl, you'd need to think about this as well. qtopengl can pretty much only render. Think of it as a viewport. However, it is the correct approach to making a 3D application for the desktop.
Programming 3D applications is really interesting and fun. I enjoyed it a lot. However, don't get discouraged be the math. I recommend getting a book about it if you are serious. I liked this one: http://www.amazon.com/Primer-Graphics-Development-Wordware-Library/dp/1556229119
However, IIRC the examples are C++ which you may not be comfortable with. When you understand such mathematical concepts, it easier to think about how you would make a page curl type affect. Of course, if you find libraries or code that shows you how to do the math, that may be fine.
May be, just create a GUI and all effects will make compiz?
Anyway, as I know QT have ability to use openGL.
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.1/examples.html#opengl-examples