wxpython balloonframe overlays all windows - python

I am using BalloonTip and BalloonFrame from wxpython in order to generate pop up notifications. Unfortunately the generated elements are overlapping all windows: Not only the window of my application but also all windows of the other applications.
I would like to suppress this behavior and display the notification only on top of my own application and not on top of all windows.
Is there any possibility to specify the "z-index" like in CSS or something similar?

You should probably just create your own frame then as I don't believe the Balloon widgets support that behavior. When you do create your own frame, you can tell it to center on parent. If you want it to disappear on it's own, you can use a wx.Timer. You could also look at this:
http://wxpython.org/Phoenix/docs/html/adv.NotificationMessage.html

Related

How to create a file browser in wxpython

I am developing the GUI for my application using wxpython and have most of the features down, except in the main frame/window I want to have a box for choosing a file (in this case, the input will have to be an excel file). Something similar to the standard filebrowser that is accessed whenever you choose "open" from a menu.
Below is an image to show exactly what I want...
You probably want a wx.FileDialog. It provides access to the default file dialog of the OS your app is running in. You can see an example of how it's used in the wxPython demo package. This tutorial also has some screenshots and sample code:
http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/06/26/the-dialogs-of-wxpython-part-1-of-2/
The screenshot you show appears to be an interface to actually open the dialog. You can easily create that using sizers and basic widgets. Then just bind the open button to a handler that will show the dialog.
You might also want to take a look at the FileBrowseButton from wx.lib.filebrowsebutton (also in the demo).
There are a few other related widgets which you might be interested in too: wx.DirDialog, MultiDirDialog or wx.GenericDirDialog.
Assuming you know the basics of wxPython you can use wx.GenericDirCtrl and wx.ListCtrl to make nice browser

Python Tkinter interface appearance changes depending on OS

My application looks beautiful on Windows
But on MacOS and Linux it does not look nice at all!
Is there something I can do to help make this widget appearance consistent across operating systems?
My application source code : http://pae.st/BILs/
Using Tkinter's place manager for widget layout causes the poor layout of your application on different operating systems. You should be using either pack or grid managers, both of which will adjust to the differing widget sizes you encounter.

Using the ttk (tk 8.5) Notebook widget effectively (scrolling of tabs)

I'm working on a project using Tkinter and Python. In order to have native theming and to take advantage of the new widgets I'm using ttk in Python 2.6. My problem is how to allow the user to scroll through the tabs in the notebook widget (a la firefox). Plus, I need a part in the right edge of the tabs for a close button. The frame for the active tab would need to fill the available horizontal space (including under the scroll arrows).
I thought I could do this using the Place geometry manager, but I was wondering if there was a better way? The ttk python docs don't have any methods to deal with this that I could see.
Edit: looks like there are difficulties for even trying to implement this using place. For one, I'd still need the tabs to scroll and the active panel to stay in the one place.
The notebook widget doesn't do scrolling of tabs (or multiple layers of them either) because the developer doesn't believe that they make for a good GUI. I can see his point; such GUIs tend to suck. The best workaround I've seen is to have a panel on the side that allows the selection of which pane to display. You can then apply tricks to that panel to manage the amount of information there (e.g., by making it a treeview widget and holding the info hierarchically, much like most email clients handle mail folders; treeview widgets are scrollable).
I've never used these widgets so I have no idea how possible this is, but what I would try is something akin to the grid_remove() method. If you can move the tabs to an invisible widget, or just make them invisible without losing content, that's what I'd look for/try.

wxPython on Mac OS X: creating a wx.Frame without stealing focus

I managed to get it working on Win32 (inheriting from wx.MiniFrame does the trick), on wxGTK (wx.PopupWindow) but whatever I try, when I create a frame on wxMac, my main window loses focus and the new frame gets it.
wxMac does not seem to have a way to interact with the native platform (something like GetHandle() on Win32 and GetGTKWidget() on wxGTK), so I can't hack around it this way.
I managed to get this working in another situation, by creating the frame at startup and moving it outside of the display area, then moving it in a visible position when needed. But right now this would be cumbersome because I don't know in advance how many frames I will need.
So, any simpler way to do this ?
If you want to get native handle to window in Mac you can do
frame.MacGetTopLevelWindowRef()
and may be you can use pyobjc to interact with windows natively, but why don't you set focus on the window you want to after opening mini-frame?

Can you auto hide frames/dialogs using wxPython?

I would like to create an application that has 3-4 frames (or windows) where each frame is attached/positioned to a side of the screen (like a task bar). When a frame is inactive I would like it to auto hide (just like the Windows task bar does; or the dock in OSX). When I move my mouse pointer to the position on the edge of the screen where the frame is hidden, I would like it to come back into focus.
The application is written in Python (using wxPython for the basic GUI aspects). Does anyone know how to do this in Python? I'm guessing it's probably OS dependent? If so, I'd like to focus on Windows first.
I don't do GUI programming very often so my apologies if this makes no sense at all.
As far as I know, there's nothing built in for this.
When the window is hidden, do you want it completely invisible or can a border of a few pixels be showing? That would be an easy way to get a mouse hover event. Otherwise you might have to use something like pyHook to get system-wide mouse events to know when to expand your window.
The events EVT_ENTER_WINDOW and EVT_LEAVE_WINDOW might also be useful here to know when the user has entered/left the window so you can expand/collapse it.
Expanding/collapsing can just be done by showing/hiding windows or resizing them. Standard window functions, nothing fancy.
By the way, you might want to use wx.ClientDisplayRect to figure out where to position your window. That will give you a rectangle of the desktop that does NOT include the task bar or any other toolbars the user has, assuming you want to avoid overlapping with those things.
Personally, I would combine the EVT_ENTER_WINDOW and EVT_LEAVE_WINDOW that FogleBird mentioned with a wx.Timer. Then whenever it the frame or dialog is inactive for x seconds, you would just call its Hide() method.
I think you could easily just make a window that is the same size as the desktop then do some while looping for an inactivity variable based on mouse position, then thread off a timer for loop for the 4 inactivity variables. I'd personally design it so that when they reach 0 from 15, they change size and position to become tabular and create a button on them to reactivate. lots of technical work on this one, but easily done if you figure it out

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