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?
Related
Is there any tkinter widget or window manager to realize internal frame (something like java internal frame)? Have done some search but couldn't see any discussion on python support of internal frame.
No, there is nothing pre-built, but tkinter has all of the fundamental building blocks to implement it. The embedded windows are just frames, and you can place them in a containing frame with place. You can add your own border, and add mouse bindings to allow the user to move the windows around.
For what it's worth, usability experts long ago decided this type of UI isn't very user friendly.
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
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 am a new programmer with little experience but I am in the process of learning Python 2.7. I use Python(x,y) or Spydar as the programs are called on Windows 7.
The main packages I'm using are numpy, pil and potentially win32gui.
I am currently trying to write a program to mine information from a 3rd-party software. This is against their wishes and they have made it difficult. I'm using ImageGrab and then numpy to get some results. This however, or so i belive, forces me to keep the window I want to read in focus, which is not optimal.
I'm wondering if there is any way to hijack the whole window and redirect the output directly into a "virtual" copy, just so I can have it running in the background?
When looking at the demos for win32api, there is a script called desktopmanager. I never got it to work, probably since I'm running Windows 7, that's supposed to create new desktops. I don't really know how multiple desktops work but if they run in parallel, there may be a way to create a new desktop around a current window. I don't know how, it's just a thought so far.
The reason it's not working for me is not that it's not creating a new desktop, it's that once it's been created, I can't return from it. The taskbar icon nor the taskbar itself ever appears.
One approach that might work would be to do something like so:
get the window handle (FindWindow() or something similar, there are a few ways to do this)
get the window dimensions (GetClientRect() or GetWindowRect())
get the device context for the window (GetWindowDC())
get the image data from the window (BitBlt() or similar)
It is possible that you will need elevated privelages to access another processes window dc, if so you may need to inject code/dll into the target process space to do this.
HTH.
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