Category Archives: Programming

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter –SECOND EDITION!

It’s official, friends — The second edition of my book, Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, is officially available for purchase on Amazon!

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, Second Edition!

This new edition has been my primary focus since last February, and it’s a lot more than just a dust-off of the text and a new cover. Here’s a rundown of the improvements we’ve made since the first edition:

  • Obviously, we updated the code for Python 3.9 and the latest versions of other libraries (Postgres, Matplotlib, cx_Freeze, etc). Many things that had to be worked around in the first edition are fixed now, so all that’s been updated.
  • The learning curve is completely re-tooled. The first edition jumped straight into OOP usage, which I found caused a lot of beginners to struggle. This version starts out with more procedural Tkinter code for the first few chapters. There is an entire new chapter that specifically covers classes and OOP, and goes through various practical ways you can use classes with a Tkinter application.
  • There is a stronger emphasis and consistency in MVC design throughout the book.
  • The networking section now covers SFTP instead of FTP, for a more modern take on file transfers.
  • We cover more Tkinter widgets, and lots of new things the first edition didn’t cover.
  • Overall the text is fleshed out and more readable; the book is about 50% longer than the original edition!

It’s hard to put into words how much work went into this revision; I had a GREAT editing team this time around and technical feedback from author and coder Alejandro Rodas de Paz (author of Tkinter GUI Application Development Cookbook) who really kept me on my toes!

For my Youtube audience, I hope to get a video together soon to tell you all about it!

New Coding-oriented Youtube channel

I’ve been a Youtuber for some time now, mostly focusing on music and studio things. But in light of my side career as an author of coding books, I’ve just created a new Alan D Moore Codes channel related to coding.

Not only that, I’ve just uploaded my first video to the channel describing the proper way to integrate QtDesigner with PyQt5. I’ve seen a lot of people on reddit and elsewhere doing it incorrectly and getting themselves quite fouled up, so I thought I might offer some insight.

I’ll have some more PyQt5-related content going up there soon hopefully, we’ll see how things go.

Mastering GUI Programming with Python

It’s here! My latest book is available from Packt Publications.

It’s here! My latest book, Mastering GUI Programming with Python, is now available in print and eBook formats from Packt Publications. Best of all, it’s currently on sale for 50% off! Can’t wait to hear what you, dear reader, think about it.

See my previous blog post for more details on what’s inside. Or, better, yet, pick up a copy while it’s on sale and find out for yourself!

Did I say September? I meant JUNE!

It’s been a crazy six months working on my new book, Mastering GUI Programming with Python. So crazy that I somehow finished up 3 months early!

Right now the book is going through the last editing stages, gearing up for a release at the end of May, so eBook copies should be available by June at the latest (print copies take a little longer to become available). With that being the case, I am way overdue to give an update on what this book is all about.

What’s in the book?

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Coming September 2019: My second book!

Hot off the heels (well, warmish off the heels) of my first book, I’ve begun writing my second book for Packt Publications, Mastering GUI Programming with Python.

Like my first book, this book tackles building GUI applications in Python, but instead of Tkinter this time I’ll be covering PyQt5. Also unlike the first book, I’ll be spending less time on general application development topics and more time digging deep into the more interesting nooks and crannies of PyQt5.

And boy does it have some interesting nooks and crannies! Apart from the garden-variety buttons-and-text-widgets forms, the book will delve into topics like rich text editing, multimedia editing, 3D graphics, and Raspberry Pi.

Needless to say I have a lot of work ahead researching, coding, and writing this book; I’m just as excited to see where I’ll be as a programmer by the end of this as I am to see what kind of reception this book gets.

Keep an eye on the blog for more news as the book comes into shape.

Tkinter book now available for pre-order

The cover of Python GUI programming with Tkinter by Alan D MooreExciting news!  My book is now available for pre-order from Packt Publications.    It won’t be out until June, but I’m 2/3 of the way through writing and pretty pleased with what I’ve got so far.

If you know a budding Python programmer who’s interested in writing desktop applications, this is going to be a great book for them; even if they don’t end up using Tkinter in the long run, they’ll learn a lot of good coding habits and application design techniques.

For example, I just finished up a chapter on unit testing that covers the Python unittest library in-depth and walks the reader through writing real tests on actual application code.  Beyond the basics, we deal with challenges like mocking out file access, testing mixin classes, and creating integration tests on our GUI elements.

If you have any questions about what is or isn’t in the book, or suggestions on topics I shouldn’t leave out, feel free to comment!

https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/python-gui-programming-tkinter

 

Big news: A book is on the way!

This blog has been a tad slow over the last year or so, mostly because I’ve been concentrating more on making music than writing code; but that all changed when I was contacted last month with an opportunity to write a book on Tkinter.  So, sometime early next summer, my first book, Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, will be available from Packt Publications.

Wait, Tkinter?  In 2018??

Yes, I know what you’re thinking; it’s either “What on earth is Tkinter?” or “Why would you do a book on it in 2018?”

For those asking the first question, Tkinter is a GUI programming library built into the Python standard library; and if that doesn’t mean anything to you, you might not be the target demographic for this book. 🙂

For those asking the second question — well, hear me out.

To start with, this book isn’t just going to be a dry Tkinter how-to; it’s fundamentally a book about writing end-user applications and choosing the right technology to solve real-world problems (particularly in the workplace).  I’ll be going through the process of dissecting a business need and building an appropriate software solution.

The simplicity and ready availability of Tkinter makes it a decent choice for teaching budding Python programmers these principles.

But as for Tkinter itself, I think it gets a bum rap from the Python community.  Sure, it’s not a glamorous, trendy library.  It doesn’t have declarative syntax, a million and one widgets for every occasion, a Javascriptesque mini-language for form automation, or a 100 Mb browser exectuable bundled into it.  But Tkinter hardly deserves the pariah status some Python coders give it.

The three things I mainly hear about Tkinter are:

It’s ugly

Not so many years ago, Tkinter was hideous.  Aliased fonts, limited theming, and widgets that escaped from a 1990s Unix desktop made for a look that screamed LEGACY and indelibly marked Tkinter as deprecated in the minds of many Python coders.  This has changed though; fonts are now anti-aliased, and the TTK widget set provides themable, platform-appropriate widgets.  Tkinter may not give you the Material Design look or animated semitranslucent widgets, but for your standard utility, control panel, or data-drive application, it looks fine.

The widgets are too simple

Tkinter’s form widgets are a tad disappointing when you first use them.  Comboboxes and Spinboxes don’t behave like their counterparts in other toolkits.  In the book I’m going to turn this weakness into a strength, by showing you how to extend and customize these widgets to behave precisely the way our users need them to behave.

It doesn’t scale well to larger applications

I’ve read (and maybe even said?) many times that Tkinter is “fine for small apps, but doesn’t scale to big things”.  That may be true depending on your definition of “small” and “big”, but most of us aren’t building Microsoft Office.  The book is going to go through creating a moderately-sized database application that would be pretty typical of in-house software and I’ll be demonstrating techniques to make Tkinter scale.

Exciting times, folks

This is my first experience as an author, so I’m hoping it goes well.  If you have particular aspects of Tkinter you’d like to see covered, let me know!

WCGBrowser in AUR

As of tonight, WCGBrowser is available from the Arch User repository! Arch Linux users can install “wcgbrowser-git” using their favorite AUR front-end, or by downloading the PKGBUILD directly from the AUR.

Enjoy!

Meet ADMBrowser

It’s been a snowy week like Tennessee hasn’t seen in decades, so with a couple of extra down-days on my hands I decided to work on a project that’s been on my docket for some time: porting WCGBrowser to a new web-rendering engine.

WCGBrowser has been my most popular open-source project by far, and between blog posts I’ve seen and emails I’ve received, it seems to be powering kiosks and signage from New England to the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia. I’ve found it quite useful within my own organization, but it’s Achille’s heel for many years has been QtWebKit.

QtWebKit is, basically, dead, and starting to stink a little. Its performance is slow, it’s buggy with some websites, and it tends to leak memory like a seive. The Qt community has been working for the last couple year to integrate Chrome/Chromium’s Blink browser engine into Qt, and recently with the release of 5.4 this new “QtWebEngine” library is now available for me to play with on Arch Linux.

So I’ve begun porting the browser to QtWebEngine. It became immediately obvious that this was going to break a lot of things in WCGBrowser, and I’ve been wanting to change the name for a while, so I decided to fork WCGBrowser and start a new project.

I give you ADMBrowser.

Yeah, I went full ego on the name. Mostly I just want to avoid a name collision with a commercial browser, since there is a new one being bankrolled by VC every five minutes.

ADMBrowser

So far ADMBrowser is a quick-n-dirty port of WCGBrowser to QtWebEngine, basically discarding any features that couldn’t be easily ported with a search-and-replace. Sadly, that’s a lot of important features so far:

  • Plugin support
  • External File (PDF, etc) support
  • Privacy mode
  • Proxy support
  • Certificate handling

That’s just the quick core-features test findings. I haven’t tried all the more obscure features yet. Needless to say, don’t swap your production rig to ADMBrowser just yet.

Apart from the WebEngine move, I plan to clean up some of the redundant configuration options and maybe organize things a little better. I’ll also be dropping support for Python 2 (or at least not going far out of my way to support it).

Hopefully QtWebEngine will mature quickly, or workarounds will come to light. I can tell already that many rendering and performance bugs from the old WCGBrowser are tidied by by the new renderer.

If you’re Python & Qt coder who might be able to help me fix some of these things, please feel free to fork and submit pull requests.

Python 3.4.0!

Just noticed that Python 3.4 is released as of yesterday.  I don’t normally pay much attention to Python releases, since the language more or less has done what I needed for some time; but bringing pip into the default distribution will make Windows deployments a bit easier.   The new Pathlib module looks pretty sweet too (no more mucking about with os.path).

Good job Python team!

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