November 25, 2013 by
Mike Recently I've started learning about Kivy, a Python Natural User Interface (NUI) toolkit. As I understand it, Kivy is kind of a spiritual successor to pyMT, which you can read more about here. In this article, we will be learning how Kivy handles layout management. While you can position widgets using x/y coordinates, in every […]
November 22, 2013 by
Mike Python's "batteries included" philosophy even includes a module for object serialization. They call it the pickle module. Some people call serialization by other names, such as marshalling or flattening. In Python, it's known as "pickling". The pickle module also has an optimized C-based version known as cPickle that can run up to 1000 times faster […]
November 18, 2013 by
Mike I like to use Wingware's IDE for coding in Python. I am working through some sample applications with Kivy, a cross-platform Python GUI framework that can also create UIs for mobile. Anyway, getting Kivy set up in Wing is slightly confusing, so here's a crash course: Download Kivy Unzip Kivy somewhere. In my case, I […]
November 14, 2013 by
Mike The other day, someone asked me if I could write a script that could cleanup a directory of all files that are greater than or equal to X number of days old. I ended up using Python's core modules for this task. We will spend some time looking at one way to do this useful […]
November 14, 2013 by
Mike I was recently asked to review a Python blog, which is something I've never really done before. The blog's name is "Bite Sized Python Tips" and you can find it here: http://freepythontips.wordpress.com/. It is run by a fellow named Yasoob. When I first glanced through the site, I saw a lot of articles that were […]
November 11, 2013 by
Mike There aren't very many Tkinter books in existence, which is something I've always found a little odd as it is the GUI toolkit that is included with Python. Basically you have Grayson's Python and Tkinter Programming from 2000 or Roseman's Modern Tkinter for Busy Python Developers from 2012. I reviewed the latter here, if you're […]