This article will be about a topic that can be used across platforms, such as Linux, Windows and Mac.
I see this come up from time to time where people will ask how to center a widget in a window. The solution is actually quite easy. In most cases, you just need to nest a Horizontal BoxSizer inside of a Verticel BoxSizer with some spacers. In this article, I’ll show you two three different […]
wxPython 101: How to Center a Widget Read More »
I recently came across a fun little project called EasyGUI_Qt. It’s basically the same thing as EasyGUI except that it uses PyQt4 instead of Tkinter. The idea behind both of these packages is to allow the developer to ask the user simple questions using dialogs. In this article, we’ll spend some time learning how to
An Intro to EasyGUI_Qt Read More »
The wxPython library comes with a pair of handy methods called Freeze() and Thaw(). The call to Freeze() prevents the window from updating while it is frozen. This can be useful when you are adding or removing widgets and you want to reduce your UI from appearing to flicker. After you finish updating the UI,
wxPython: Freeze and Thaw Read More »
I don’t do a lot of plotting in my job, but I recently heard about a website called Plotly that provides a plotting service for anyone’s data. They even have a plotly package for Python (among others)! So in this article we will be learning how to plot with their package. Let’s have some fun
Plotting Data Online via Plotly and Python Read More »
I was looking through some of my old code and noticed this old script where I was creating a log of all running processes every 5 minutes. I believe I originally wrote the code to help me diagnose rogue processes that were eating memory or pegging the CPU. I was using the psutil project to
Logging Currently Running Processes with Python Read More »
There are several 3rd party packages that wrap Twitter’s API. We’ll be looking at tweepy and twitter. The tweepy documentation is a bit more extensive than twitter’s, but I felt that the twitter package had more concrete examples. Let’s spend some time going over how to use these packages!
How to Connect to Twitter with Python Read More »
I’ve been hearing some buzz about a newish web service called Twilio which allows you to send SMS and MMS messages among other things. There’s a handy Python wrapper to their REST API as well. If you sign up with Twilio, they will give you a trial account without even requiring you to provide a
Python 101: How to send SMS/MMS with Twilio Read More »
Recently I wrote about the arrow project and one of my readers mentioned that another datetime related project known as Delorean. So in this article, we’ll spend some time going over the delorean project. This will be a high level article as there is no reason to rewrite the delorean’s documentation.
Python – Taking Time with Delorean Read More »
The wxPython GUI toolkit includes its own date / time capabilities. Most of the time, you can just use Python’s datetime and time modules and you’ll be fine. But occasionally you’ll find yourself needing to convert from wxPython’s wx.DateTime objects to Python’s datetime objects. You may encounter this when you use the wx.DatePickerCtrl widget. Fortunately,
wxPython: Converting wx.DateTime to Python datetime Read More »
The other day, I saw an interesting question on StackOverflow where the author asked if there was a way to serialize a Python dictionary into a human-readable format. The answer that was given was to use a package called jsonpickle, which will serialize complex Python objects to and from JSON. This article will give you
jsonpickle: Turning Python pickles into JSON Read More »
The other day, I came across an article about a fork of the pbs package called sh. These packages are wrappers for Python’s subprocess module. Basically sh allows you to import and use shell commands directly from Python. This article will go over a few examples to show you how to use this fun little
The new sh Package – A subprocess wrapper Read More »
The arrow project is an attempt to wrap Python’s time and datetime modules into a single API. It also claims to plug gaps in functionality in those modules, such as time spans, ISO-8601 and humanization. You can kind of think of arrow as a drop-in replacement for Python’s datetime and time modules, much like the
arrow – A new date / time package for Python Read More »
The Pony ORM project is another object relational mapper package for Python. They allow you to query a database using generators. They also have an online ER Diagram Editor that is supposed to help you create a model. When I first started using PonyORM, they were one of the only Python packages I’ve seen with
Python 101: An Intro to Pony ORM Read More »
I thought it would be fun to try out a few different Python object relational mappers (ORMs) besides SQLAlchemy. I recently stumbled across a project known as peewee. For this article, we will take the examples from my SQLAlchemy tutorial and port it to peewee to see how it stands up. The peewee project supports
An Intro to peewee – Another Python ORM Read More »
Redirecting stdout seems to be a pretty common request on the wxPython users group, so I decided to see how easy it would be to do it with Tkinter. The typical use case for redirecting stdout or stderr is that you are calling some other process (like ping or tracert) and you want to catch
Tkinter – Redirecting stdout / stderr Read More »