Creating a graphical application – Start menu

The example in this recipe shows how we can define our own variations of Tkinter objects to generate custom controls and dynamically construct a menu with them. We will also take a quick look at using threads to allow other tasks to continue to function while a particular task is being executed.

Getting ready

To view the GUI display, you will need a monitor displaying the Raspberry Pi desktop, or you need to be connected to another computer running the X server.

How to do it...

1. To create a graphical Start menu application, create the following graphicmenu.py script:

#!/usr/bin/python3 
# graphicmenu.py 
import tkinter as tk 
from subprocess import call 
import threading 
 
#Define applications ["Display name","command"] 
leafpad = ["Leafpad","leafpad"] 
scratch = ["Scratch","scratch"] 
pistore = ["Pi Store","pistore"] 
app_list = [leafpad,scratch,pistore] 
APP_NAME = 0 
APP_CMD  = 1 
 
class runApplictionThread(threading.Thread): 
    def __init__...