GUI Programming in Python For Beginners: Create a Timer in 30 Minutes
Packing Them In
Akkana Peck
Thursday, March 26, 2009 11:54:38 AM
Packing them in
The pack commands for each of these widget --
button.pack(), label.pack(side=LEFT), and so forth -- tell Tkinter
to add the widget in the window that contains it.
But pack doesn't really give you much control over
where widgets go, so most Tkinter programmers use another method
for placing widgets: grid.
Think of your window as a grid, with some number of rows and columns.
Each time you add a new widget, you can specify exactly where in the
grid it goes. For example, try removing all the pack
lines from your script, and replace them with these grid calls:
minutes.grid(row=0, column=0)
scale.grid(row=0, column=1)
button.grid(row=1, column=1, pady=5, sticky=E)
Now the window looks like Figure 4 (Listing 4).
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Doing something useful: setting the timer
Now you have a nice window ... but it still doesn't do anything yet.
How do you make it start a timer when you click Start?
The answer is that command=quit when you created the
Button. quit is the name of the function that's called
when the user clicks the button. You can replace it with your own
function. That function will need to get the number of minutes the
user chose from the Scale widget. You do that with scale.get().
So your function might look like this:
def start_timer() :
root.after(scale.get() * 60000, show_alert)
scale.get() gets the value the user set with the slider.
root.after() sets a timeout -- but it's in milliseconds,
not minutes, so you have to multiply the scale's value by 60,000.
Here's a tip, though: when you're debugging, you might want to
use 1000 rather than 60000, so the slider represents seconds, not
minutes and you don't have to wait so long to see if your code works.
Now all that's left is the show_alert() function that
grabs your attention when the timer fires.
Here's one that beeps and then shows an "info" dialog:
def show_alert() :
root.bell()
tkMessageBox.showinfo("Ready!", "DING DING DING!")
quit()
bell() makes a noise, while tkMessageBox.showinfo() will
bring up a little dialog (Figure 5, Listing 5).
======================================================
# Listing 4
#!/usr/bin/env python
from Tkinter import *
root = Tk()
minutes = Label(root, text="Minutes:")
minutes.grid(row=0, column=0)
scale = Scale(root, from_=1, to=45, orient=HORIZONTAL, length=300)
scale.grid(row=0, column=1)
button = Button(root, text="Start timing", command=quit)
button.grid(row=1, column=1, pady=5, sticky=E)
root.mainloop()
======================================================
======================================================
# Listing 5
#!/usr/bin/env python
from Tkinter import *
import tkMessageBox
def show_alert() :
root.bell()
tkMessageBox.showinfo("Ready!", "DING DING DING!")
quit()
def start_timer() :
# Next line should be * 60000, but use 1000 to speed debugging:
root.after(scale.get() * 1000, show_alert)
root = Tk()
minutes = Label(root, text="Minutes:")
minutes.grid(row=0, column=0)
scale = Scale(root, from_=1, to=45, orient=HORIZONTAL, length=300)
scale.grid(row=0, column=1)
button = Button(root, text="Start timing", command=start_timer)
button.grid(row=1, column=1, pady=5, sticky=E)
root.mainloop()
======================================================
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