Sometimes, you see a piece of code and it just feels right. Here's an example I found when doing my "Import Antigravity" session for PyDay Buenos Aires: the progressbar module.

Here's an example that will teach you enough to use progressbar effectively:

progress = ProgressBar()
for i in progress(range(80)):
    time.sleep(0.01)

Yes, that's it, you will get a nice ASCII progress bar that goes across the ter­mi­nal, sup­ports re­siz­ing and moves as you it­er­ate from 0 to 79.

The progressbar module even lets you do fancier things like ETA or fie transfer speeds, all just as nicely.

Is­n't that code just right? You want a progress bar for that loop? Wrap it and you have one! And of course since I am a PyQt pro­gram­mer, how could I make PyQt have some­thing as right as that?

Here'show the out­put looks like:

You can do this with ev­ery toolk­it, and you prob­a­bly should!. It has one ex­tra fea­ture: you can in­ter­rupt the it­er­a­tion. Here's the (short) code:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys, time
from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui

def progress(data, *args):
    it=iter(data)
    widget = QtGui.QProgressDialog(*args+(0,it.__length_hint__()))
    c=0
    for v in it:
        QtCore.QCoreApplication.instance().processEvents()
        if widget.wasCanceled():
            raise StopIteration
        c+=1
        widget.setValue(c)
        yield(v)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)

    # Do something slow
    for x in progress(xrange(50),"Show Progress", "Stop the madness!"):
        time.sleep(.2)

Have fun!

Hell yeah! It has been a lot of work but it's out at http://re­vista.python.org.ar

Some ar­ti­cles:

• PyAr, The His­­to­ry

• from gc im­­port com­­mon­sense - Fin­ish Him!

• Pain­­less Con­cur­ren­­cy: The mul­ti­pro­cess­ing Mod­­ule

• In­­tro­­duc­­tion to Unit Test­ing with Python

• Taint Mode in Python

• Ap­­plied Dy­­namism

• Dec­o­rat­ing code (Part 1)

• We­b2Py for Ev­ery­­body

It's avail­able in pret­ty much ev­ery for­mat any­one can read, and if your favourite is not there, we will make it for you or may I be smote by the fly­ing spaghet­ti mon­ster's nood­ly ap­pendage!

AFAIK there is no oth­er Python mag­a­zine be­ing pub­lished (feel free to cor­rect me), so it's kind of a big thing for us in PyAr (the Ar­genti­na Python com­mu­ni­ty) that we are do­ing one, and in two lan­guages.

But why stop here? Want it to be avail­able in your lan­guage? Con­tact us at re­vistap­yar@net­man­ager­s.­com.ar it may be doable!

And of course, very soon there will be a call for ar­ti­cles for Is­sue 2, and trust me: that one's go­ing to be epic: this one was just a warmup.

Here's what I'm think­ing: how hard could it be to make PyQt app de­ploy­ment ab­so­lute­ly easy? Well, I am guess­ing: not very hard.

Here's the trick: see what works in the re­al world, and adopt it.

Ques­tion: what has de­ployed bil­lions of apps and has its users hap­py? An­swer: phones app stores.

Ques­tion: how do they work? An­swer: well, that's not that short, so let's start ex­plain­ing.

As I see it, a rea­son­able app store has the fol­low­ing com­po­nents: