The Mouse Vs. The Python

Last Thursday (the 5th) I attended Pyowa, the local Iowa Python Users group I founded a few years ago. We had Scott Peterson from Principal Financial Group come and talk to us about Library Gadget, a cool Django-based website he created to track what library books his family has checked out. Now he has lots of users using his website. It not only tracks the books you have borrowed, but it’ll auto-renew them if it can and let you know if you’re books are overdue.

He spent most of his time talking about the backend stuff behind the website though. Such as why he chose Amazon Web Services, how he uses Puppet, Vagrant and Fabric to manage his server’s settings and back them up.

The second talk was done by myself and I spoke on my MediaLocker project, an open source wxPython application that is supposed to help you track your media library. Most of my time was spent telling the story behind the project and showing a demo. Then I took some questions.

Overall, I’d say that we had a really good meeting with 10 people showing up. Next month, on February 2nd, we’re bringing in the BIG guns though. We have Doug Hellman and Steve Holden scheduled to Skype in and talk to us.

Doug Hellman is the author of The Python Standard Library By Example, is a senior developer with Racemi, Inc., and communications director of the Python Software Foundation. He has programmed with Python since version 1.4, and has worked on multiple platforms in mapping, medical publishing, banking, and data center automation. Hellmann was previously columnist and editor-in-chief for Python Magazine and, since 2007, has blogged the popular Python Module of the Week

Steve Holden is chairman of the Python Software Foundation and author of Python Web Programming. He owns Python consulting business and does Python training.

The wxPython project’s Phoenix release is slowly coming along. Phoenix is the codename for the new wxPython that will support both Python 2.x and 3.x. Anyway, Andrea Gavana has put together some autogenerated documentation using Sphinx on top of Doxygen. You can read about the announcement including any known issues on the wxPython mailing list.

For those of you who are brave, you can also read about a snapshot build of Phoenix here or download the a tarball here. Note: These tarballs are only for Mac and Window users and they are not completely working.

For those of you who don’t know anything about Project Phoenix, you can read about it on the wxPython wiki.

Have you ever wondered how to create those little status icons in the Windows System Tray that usually appear on the lower right of your screen? The wxPython toolkit provides a pretty simple way to do just that and this article will walk you through the process. (more…)

Background
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This is the first release of a real project that I’ve been involved in. I had written an article last month that inspired Werner Bruhin to want to take it and make it into a demonstration program for new wxPython programmers in how to do MVC and CRUD while interfacing with a database. Thus, MediaLocker was born. We hope you like it.

Description
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A wxPython database application that can help you keep track of your media. Currently, it only tracks your Book library. You can read more about the project’s development in the following two articles:

• Improving MediaLocker: wxPython, SQLAlchemy and MVC
• wxPython and SQLAlchemy: An Intro to MVC and CRUD

Requirements
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- Python 2.6+
- wxPython 2.8.11+ with the new pubsub (download here) or wxPython 2.9.3
- SQLAlchemy 0.7.3+
- ObjectListView 1.2

Configuration
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After you have downloaded the source, run “python setup_lib.py develop” in the main folder before you try to run “mediaLocker.py”. If you are on wxPython 2.8, download the pubsub path (above) and extract it to “C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\wx-2.9.2-msw\wx\lib” (or wherever your wxPython is installed).

Source
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You can download the source from BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/driscollis/medialocker

You can also just download a snapshot of the current files here (uploaded 2011.12.09 @ 1138 hrs CST):

• medialocker.zip
• medialocker.tar
• Or just download from the tip on bitbucket

How you can help
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Download the software and report bugs on BitBucket. We also happily accept feature requests, especially if they include patches or code.

Note: This has only been tested on Windows XP and 7

This blog ran an article about wxPython, SQLAlchemy, CRUD and MVC earlier this month. The program that we created in that post was dubbed “MediaLocker”, whether or not it was explicitly stated as such. Anyway, since then, I have received a couple comments about improving the program. One came from Michael Bayer, one of the creative minds behind SQLAlchemy itself and the other comments came from Werner Bruhin, a nice guy who haunts the wxPython mailing list, helping new users. So I went about creating an improved version of the code following their advice. Werner then improved it a bit more. So in this article, we will be looking at improving the code, first with my example and then with his. Enough talk though; let’s get to the meat of story! (more…)

In this article, we will be creating a program to store our personal books or perhaps just the books you’ve read. It will demonstrate how to combine wxPython and SqlAlchemy, a SQL Object Relational Mapper (ORM). This program will also give you an introduction to the model-view-controller (MVC) and “create, read, update and destroy” (CRUD) methodologies. The aim is to show you how to create an application that can do the following:

• Create a database (create)
• Add records to that database (sort of create)
• Display the records (read and view)
• Modify records (update)
• Delete records (destroy)

The order of this tutorial will follow MVC, so we will start with the model. The model is the basis for the GUI (the View) anyway, so it’s a good place to start. (more…)

Last night, Andrea Gavana released his new Namespace Diff Tool (NDT) to the world. I got his permission to reprint his announcement here for all those people who don’t follow the wxPython mailing list. I think it sounds like a really cool tool. You should check it out and see what you think. Here is the announcement: (more…)

One day at work last month, I was told that we had a feature request for one of my programs. They wanted a “dark mode” for when they used my application at night as the normal colors were kind of glaring. My program is used in laptops in police cars, so I could understand their frustration. I spent some time looking into the matter and got a mostly working script put together which I’m going to share with my readers. Of course, if you’re a long time reader, you probably know I’m talking about a wxPython program. I write almost all my GUIs using wxPython. Anyway, let’s get on with the story! (more…)

One of the new agw widgets to be included in wxPython is one called the UltimateListCtrl. It’s a pure Python widget that can have pretty much any other widget stuck into any of the cells, which makes it really flexible. It also allows the skilled programmer the ability to add custom renderers to make the interface different. In this article, we will take a quick look at this fascinating widget. (more…)

If you’ve been in the wxPython community for more than a couple months, you will probably recognize the following question: “How do I bind multiple buttons to the same event handler and make them do different things?” Well, this article will show you how to do exactly that. (more…)