Hi Ian, It appears to me that you want to develop something that requires fine control over user interface and interactivity, perhaps akin to a game?
Python has several libraries devoted to developing games, which would give you a large headstart on GUI development, keypress and joystick control, etc, because they are custom designed for such purposes. (As opposed to starting completely from scratch, as you would have to with, say, wxpython). I haven't used it myself, but people speak highly of PyGame, which seems very well documented, with oodles of tutorials, documentation and examples. http://www.pygame.org/ In particular, this site seems to be a thorough tutorial for learning both python and pygame at the same time, and would be a very good introduction to the language and writing interactive games in the language. http://programarcadegames.com/ Several other sites linked from the "Tutorials" page seem to be targeted at teaching the language as well as game programming technique. http://www.pygame.org/wiki/tutorials A cursory overview of the documentation shows that there are mechanisms for packaging developed games into standalone applications (although this one refers only to windows, but there I'd be very surprised if there are not multi-platform equivalents). http://www.pygame.org/wiki/Pygame2exe?parent=CookBook Alan. On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 6:13 PM, ian hussey <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I'm a psychology PhD student at NUI Maynooth, and I've just started looking > at Python. I have a little VB6 experience, and am working my way through > Learn Python the Hard Way at the moment. I'll ramble for on a bit about > where I'm coming from and if anyone makes it to the end and has any advice, > that'd be great! > > I have a pretty specific goal in mind, I'm looking to work my way up to > programming a psychology experiment that presents participants with pairs of > word or picture stimuli and record their key-press response times. We have a > VB6 app that we use for this already (you can download a copy of it at IRAP > 2012 Program update if you were interested for some reason) but the code is > a mess. It needs to be redone from the ground up and in something that we > can a) deploy one multiple operating systems, and b) distribute as a single > executable with no or minimal dependancies so that other researchers can > pick it up and use it with little setup time. I asked around and was pointed > towards Python. I've looked at packages like PsychoPy to make my job easier, > but they don't give adequate control over randomisation, looping, or data > output. I'm now considering using wxpython or Python Card (I was initially a > little stumped as to how to create a GUI - shows my lack of knowledge!). > > So, my questions are as follows: > 1. Am I making any obvious errors in thinking that Python + wxpython are a > relatively easy way to do this, or am I looking to do something with Python > that would be better done with another language or with another set of > tools? > 2. One colleague suggested I use a proprietary language called LiveCode, but > others have suggested this would be a bad call as I'd be locked in to their > system (and paying money I didn't have to). Thoughts? > > Thanks for reading! > > Best, > Ian > > -- > > --
