Making a splash at startup

Splash windows can be used to show information during the launching of a program and are most commonly used for applications that require some time to initialize. They provide a means to give quick feedback to the user to show that the application is in the process of starting up and that it is not hung or nonresponsive. In this recipe, we will show how to create an advanced splash screen control that is capable of displaying progress messages during the startup of an application.

How to do it…

1. First, let's start by defining the custom SplashScreen class, with the following code:

   class ProgressSplash(wx.SplashScreen):
       def __init__(self, bmp, splashStyle, timeout, parent):
           super(ProgressSplash, self).__init__(bmp, splashStyle,
                                                timeout, parent)
   
           self._msg = wx.StaticText(self)
   
           # Create status display area
           self.CreateStatusBar()
           sbarHeight = self.StatusBar.Size.height
           self...