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
Related
I am currently working on a project using Python and tkinter.
The problem is that I don't know what's the proper way to display multiple windows, or screens, I don't know how to call them. Let me explain better.
When the application starts the login screen appears. After that, if I click register, I want to go to the register screen, but I don't want it to be a separate window (I don't want to have 2 windows displayed at the same time), but rather another window with different content ?!
How should I handle properly this situation? Create a second window using Toplevel and hiding the first (can I do that?) or changing the widgets of the first?
Code I've written so far
You can do that- just call window.withdraw() on the Toplevel you need to hide after creating a new Toplevel. Changing the widgets in the first is also an option- if you like, you could always try a Notebook widget and disable manual flipping or just put each "screen" in a frame and grid_ or pack_forget them to remove them from the window.
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
Pressing command-H in OSX immediately hides the active window. How do I achieve the same effect, programmatically, from Python? Specifically, I'd like to find a particular window that my application creates and then be able to show & hide it programmatically.
I already know how to do this with pywin32 but I'm afraid my expertise there doesn't quite cover OSX as well.
If it helps, the window in question is one created by pygame. I know that pygame has pygame.display.iconify() but that doesn't satisfy my requirements - the window doesn't disappear immediately, but rather the disappearance is animated, and there's no corresponding "uniconify" function that I can find.
Well, this ended up working. When I want to hide the window, I do pygame.display.quit() and make my code properly handle not having a display. When I want to show it, I do pygame.display.set_mode(...) with the former resolution.
The net effect is that of hiding & showing the window. Unfortunately the window gets created in a different spot than where it started, and although apparently you can tell SDL to create the window in a particular spot, I haven't been able to find a way to get the window's location...
How to change the button decoration with wxPython, generally when the button is clicked, a dotted lines appear on the button.. any way to make that button not show the dotted lines?
Thanks
Assuming you're running your program on Windows (you didn't say which OS, but dotted lines are used by Windows Classic look), the dotted lines are called the focus rect, and they appear to mark a button or widget as focused. They are a system setting, and your program is acting as it should - wxWidgets is meant to emulate the underlying OS default behaviour as closely as possible.
Update
I don't think you can change this behaviour from inside the program. I really doubt that wxWidgets has a setting somewhere for this, as it is OS-dependent and is the standard and correct behaviour for the Classic theme. But the focus rect is shown by default only on the Classic Look which few people use.
Try switching to Luna theme (the default on XP), and you'll see that the focus rect won't appear unless you start hitting Tab while your window is in focus. By the way, the focus rect is needed exactly for when you are switching the focus using the Tab key. You need to see where the focus is, after all. That way you know when you press Enter or Space, which button is going to be pressed. Not everyone uses only the mouse.
You can use a custom button, for instance wx.lib.buttons.GenButton which is in pure python so you can overwrite the look, feel etc.
This also has a method SetUseFocusIndicator to turn off the dotted focus indicator
I've got a program which is using multiple monitors. The program is showing special visualizations on the second monitor. At one point, the program uses windows shell functions to send files to the recycle bin. However, when it does this, the delete confirmation dialog comes on top of my visualization. This is particularly problematic, as when the mouse is on the second monitor, my program uses mouse hooks to capture all mouse input, so the user cannot even click the confirmation dialog.
Is it possible to somehow tell Windows to only place dialog boxes on a particular display?
I'm using python, though if I have to call C WinAPI functions that shouldn't be a problem
which function are you using to send the files to the recycle bin? if you use SHFileOperation you can pass a parent HWND. perhaps make that an invisible WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW window on the other monitor.
i would expect the API, treating that window as a parent, would center relative to that window, but i haven't tried it.
depending on which version of Windows you are targeting, there used to be a capability to create desk bands that 'dock' to the sides of the screen. this automatically gets factored into the area returned as rcWork by GetMonitorInfo and should prevent dialogs from overlapping this space. There might be another way to declare that a region is "in use" in a way that declares space off-limits, but I don't know of it so it probably doesn't exist...
the ugly and crude thing you could do is poll and move the dialog yourself, but if this is any kind of widely deployed or commercial app that would likely cause more harm than good.