GUIs – Extended

GUIs used in real life, and where to go from here.

In action

  • BitTorret - Popular peer-to-peer application that makes use of PythonGtk library
  • Anaconda - Red Hat’s installation program (not to be confused with Anaconda from Continuum)
  • matplotlib - Uses PyGtk library to render graphs (as we’ve seen in our dataviz) tutorial!)

Where to go from here

Challenge yourself

Like playing around with GUIs? Why not try to create:

  • A desktop photo slideshow using your own photos, or by collecting photos via APIs from Flickr or 500px. You may have a widget for “play” where a new photo renders every few seconds; maybe a “previous” and “next” button widget; perhaps even an “Upload to” ability with Dropbox, Facebook, or Twitter.
  • Pomodoro application - a timer for productivity, where you work for 25 minutes, and take a break for 5 minutes. You’d have a least a start button widget, perhaps a widget reflecting the time countdown. To play an alarm sound, you can use the builtin module winsound, or for Linux, Mac, and Windows, try out PyGame’s mixer music module.

Additional Python libraries

  • PyQt - Python bindings for the Qt application development framework(Python 2 & 3)
  • WxPython - WxWidgets library in Python
  • PyGtk - Python wrapper for the Gtk project
  • Kivy - Python GUI library that runs on Linux, Windows, OS X, Android and iOS
  • Camelot - a Python library for developers to create business applications using Qt; was inspired by Django’s Admin interface.

Books, readings, websites, etc.