Creating a graphical application Start menu

The example in this recipe shows how we can define our own variations of the 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 need to be connected to another computer running the X server.

How to do it…

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__(self,app_cmd):
  ...