I would like to recreate the programs shown in this article on a Mac. Is this possible? My research so far has pointed to "no" but I don't want to give up just yet. Python is preferred but my purpose for this is simple enough that most any language is fine.
Edit: To elaborate on my goal, it is to write individual pixels to the screen with no background. I don't care if they're removed by mouse movements, and if there is a better way to do this than framebuffers I will use that.
Unfortunately, the MacOS kernel doesn't expose a file to access the framebuffer (such as /dev/fb0 on Linux).
There could be a way to do this using the MacOS APIs. In 2004 the DirectFB project had this working (here's the commit that added it: https://github.com/DirectFB/directfb/commit/cbe9cfd0446bfa8c6fcd18b7cbc805566eec9b5d#diff-250fcad7219dfcf74cf05db93c9070445945c9e39cd6529f67d1a00ea93961da ). However, in the last decade it's likely that these APIs have been deprecated and you'd have to look into whatever replaced them.
It's easy enough to use Metal or OpenGL though. Just make a fullscreen window, make two large triangles the size of the screen, and update their texture.
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I have been using pyqt and qt designer to make a program. I wanted to custom style the top bar which holds the icon and minimize,resize,close buttons. To do this I started with using the Qt.FramelessWindowHint and making custom buttons and such. This has led to many problems with grabbing corners to resize and also snapping (all the built in windows functions). I was trying to sort through this but found many people talking about the problems that I am having. I was trying to go for the google chrome/maya/photoshop look where the top part is completely customized. A friend pointed out that if any of these programs crash, you can notice the windows bar will show through, which means they are not actually removing it but styling above it or something of that sort. How can I go about doing this so all the functionality is still there but it is styled.
Is there any way I can create a UAC-like environment in Python? I want to basically lock the workstation without actually using the Windows lock screen. The user should not be able to do anything except, say, type a password to unlock the workstation.
You cannot do this without cooperation with operating system. Whatever you do, Ctrl-Alt-Del will allow the user to circumvent your lock.
The API call you're looking for Win32-wise is a combination of CreateDesktop and SetThreadDesktop.
In terms of the internals of Vista+ desktops, MSDN covers this, as does this blog post. This'll give you the requisite background to know what you're doing.
In terms of making it look like the UAC dialog - well, consent.exe actually takes a screenshot of the desktop and copies it to the background of the new desktop; otherwise, the desktop will be empty.
As the other answerer has pointed out - Ctrl+Alt+Delete will still work. There's no way around that - at least, not without replacing the keyboard driver, anyway.
As to how to do this in Python - it looks like pywin32 implements SetThreadDesktop etc. I'm not sure how compatible it is with Win32; if you find it doesn't work as you need, then you might need a python extension to do it. They're not nearly as hard to write as they sound.
You might be able to get the effect you desire using a GUI toolkit that draws a window that covers the entire screen, then do a global grab of the keyboard events. I'm not sure if it will catch something like ctrl-alt-del on windows, however.
For example, with Tkinter you can create a main window, then call the overrideredirect method to turn off all window decorations (the standard window titlebar and window borders, assuming your window manager has such things). You can query the size of the monitor, then set this window to that size. I'm not sure if this will let you overlay the OSX menubar, though. Finally, you can do a grab which will force all input to a specific window.
How effective this is depends on just how "locked out" you want the user to be. On a *nix/X11 system you can pretty much completely lock them out (so make sure you can remotely log in while testing, or you may have to forcibly reboot if your code has a bug). On windows or OSX the effectiveness might be a little less.
I would try with pygame, because it can lock mouse to itself and thus keep all input to itself, but i wouldn't call this secure without much testing, ctr-alt-del probably escape it, can't try on windows right now.
(not very different of Bryan Oakley's answer, except with pygame)
I have a project where I have to show some sort of changing bar graph with results from a function. This bar graph should be in colour and 3d. I want it to look good since it's an open source educational program where it teaches the user about different voting systems and how they effect the outcome of an election. I would like to use python but I have no idea about using GUI frameworks since all my work in python has been command line based. Your help will be appreciated.
For 3D graphics, you might want to use OpenGL with a game framework, such as PyGame or Pyglet. Use matplotlib as TJD suggested in the other answer.
As for GUI frameworks, they generally won't help much with 3D graphics:
PyQt is one choice; I see you already have it in the question tags. PySide is very similar to PyQt, but with a nicer licence.
Then there's tkinter (in the standard library), wxPython, and pyGTK – I hear all of them are good, though I don't know them personally.
Pick one and stay with it. It'll take some time to learn if you're not experienced, so don't expect results too soon.
You might want to look at matplotlib, which is probably the most widely used library for doing graphs, including 3-D.
I need a tile/sprite editor kind of like Pixen, but I couldn't find one for Windows so I thought it might be a good exercise for me to try and put one together. I use Python, so are there any libraries out there that are suited to the task of putting together a simple tile/sprite editor?
You just need a gui toolkit (gtk, qt, wx) a image library (PIL) and 500 hours of free time ...
Have you looked at the Python Imaging Library (PIL)?
So, the fact is that creating a complex app with a nice UI takes time - I am just expanding a little bit on the answer by THC4k.
PIL, at least PIL alone is useless for this: it does have some functions to manipulate images, but the complicate task here is creating and tunning your desired UI.
That's where the widgets toolkits come in: You would have to pick a toolkit platform that can offer you buttons, images, load and save the image files, maybe some specialzed widgets you can use to create your color swatches, etc.
both GTK+ and QT4.5 have a liberal license, are very complete and very unpythonic on their use :-(
(While you are at it, when using these libraries and toolkits our app can easily be multiplatform: you don't have to make it windows specific, it is equally easy to create an app that will run on Windows, Linux and Mac using python and either GTK+ or Qt4)
One thing I would suggest is for you to learn to proper use GIMP: it is an Image editor, and certainly it will lack a lot of tools you are needing for sprites: but you can expand it's capabilities with Python plug-ins. On the other hand GIMP does have thousands of features that you'd no longer will need to create for your stand-alone app. (think on layer support, color filters, image rotation etc...)
Check around on how to install GIMP with Python support on Windows, then spend some hours learning the app, with some book-like text around preferably so you can find the hidden features.
Ah, ok, finally:
If you want a very simple thing, just for the taste of "i did it" - you can use Pygame: You have to do all the drawing on the window, including text - but have straighter access to pixels, colors, mouse clicks and coordinates than with GTK+ or Qt, in a sense it would be a lot less of overhead for you to learn in terms of API's and internal working.
You could try PyGame but, seriously, you couldn't find a freeware graphics editor for Windows??!!
EDIT: In the past I've used Aha-Soft's IconXP for pixel work, but it costs USD 30 and doesn't offer all of the Pixen features that I guess you'll want.
I'm working on an multiplatform application with wxpython and I had flickering problems on windows, while drawing on a Panel.
I used to draw on a buffer (wx.Bitmap) during mouse motions events and my OnPaint method was composed of just on line:
dc = wx.BufferedPaintDC(self, self.buffer)
Pretty standard but still I had flickering problems on Windows, while everything worked fine on Linux.
I solved my problem calling SetDoubleBuffered(True) in the __init__ method.
The strange thing is that now everything works even if I don't use BufferedPaintDC anymore. I changed my application so that all the drawing part is done in the OnPaint method. I don't use a buffer and drawing is done directly on a wx.PaintDC with no flickering problems at all.
So my question is: is BufferedPaintDC totally useless? Or deprecated somehow? I'm owner of the book "WxPython in Action" (2006) and it doesn't even mention SetDoubleBuffered
There is a high probability that the SetDoubleBuffered actually makes your panel use a buffered dc automatically, the documentation doesn't mention that those classes are deprecated (and I rather think they would if that were the case).
About wxPython in Action... 2006 was a long time ago... it is possible that the SetDoubleBuffered method didn't exist back then or that the author wanted to show how things work at the lower level.