Thanks everyone for the advice. For anyone in my boat following this thread, here's what I ended up doing:
Had a stroke of insight and coded the whole thing up (poorly) using maptlotlib w/no polling. In other words, the entire API sat in the mouse click callback function. Lame, yes---especially since some expensive AI search can be going on that takes more than a few seconds---but as long as my students take care not to enter more than one mouse click before each screen update, the app doesn't seem to suffer from inconsistency problems. Its pretty darn nice looking w/ matplotlib, too. So, that's the band aid. I'm sad to hear that its not as easy to use matplotlib to write more sophisticated apps than it is w/matlab but am glad that it is documented here. To summarize what I gleaned from Chris, the maptlotlib (interactive?) thread doesn't handle anything but its own stuff (e.g. mouse callbacks) directly, so my attempt to use the threading event/wait stuff failed for that reason (?). The pyrobotics app would be a good candidate for using matplotlib, but might not be easy to use for similar reasons. I am wondering if a socket-based approach, where matplotlib served up, for instance, mouse clicks, plots, etc, to a client app might be a good compromise. I am still unclear how John's recs for timer or idler (which I've been able to find no accessible documentation on) would have helped me. For instance, wouldn't the timer rec fail for the same reason my event wait thread hack did? Being sad, however, I understand that the main focus of matplotlib is high- and scientific-quality graphics, for which it seems to hit the nail on the head. Francisco's rec to the "for non-programmers programming a GUI" document looks very worthwhile (and I am a seasoned programmer). I intend to have a serious look at it this summer, b/c I intend to write a more serious app using Python that needs a GUI (an audio file viewer and editor to be used for my music perception research). The document does indeed seem like a good introduction to event-based programming, and had I a week or more to spare, would probably have tried using the related packages to build the app. Before the stroke-of-insight, I got lucky and managed to get a simple Tk app working that handled displaying the game and processing mouse clicks, but I foiled in my attempts to capture keyboard input, so after several hours gave up. It does seem wx is more suited for OS X, and my brief googling seems to imply that Tk is becoming the thing people---esp on OS X---USED to use. I've heard that Apple's own InterfaceBuilder is THE WAY to program GUI-based apps and wonder if anyone has had experience using this w/Python? Thanks again for the advice. A last question for Chris... > If it does look promising, be sure to get the latest version from: > > http://www.mithis.com/~chrisb I never found the time to finish my matplotlib-scipy install from source (b/c of the apple's wx incompatibility), but I do intend to finish with that business when I return in June and am wondering if your above rec about a wx latest-version would interfere with that? --b ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
