Creating Animations in GTK+ with Pycairo in SUSI Linux App

SUSI Linux has an assistant user interface to answer your queries. You may ask queries and SUSI answers interactively using a host of skills which range from entertainment, knowledge, media to science, technology and sports. While SUSI is finding the answer to the query, it makes sense to add some animations depicting the process. The UI for SUSI Linux app is wholly made using GTK+ 3 using PyGObject (PyGTK). Thus, I needed to find a way create animations in GTK+.

Animations in most frameworks are generally created using repetitive drawing after an interval which leads to the effect of an object’s movement. Thus, basic need was to find a way to draw a custom object in GTK+. Reading the documentation of the GTK+, I realized that this could be done with a GTKDrawingArea.

GTKDrawingArea defines an area on which application developers can do the drawing on their own. GTK itself does not provide Canvas and related object to draw the shapes. For that, we need to use Cairo graphics library. Cairo is an open source graphics library with support for multiple window systems. It can run on a variety of backends, though here, we are not concerned about them.

Cairo can be accessed in Python using Pycairo. Pycairo is a set of Python 2 & 3 bindings for the cairo graphics library. Resources for usage of Pycairo for animations with GTK+ 3 are very less thus I will try to explain it in this blog in detail. We will start by creating an Animator class extending the GTK DrawingArea class.

class Animator(Gtk.DrawingArea):
   def __init__(self, **properties):
       super().__init__(**properties)
       self.set_size_request(200, 80)
       self.connect("draw", self.do_drawing)
       GLib.timeout_add(50, self.tick)

   def tick(self):
       self.queue_draw()
       return True

   def do_drawing(self, widget, ctx):
       self.draw(ctx, self.get_allocated_width(), self.get_allocated_height())

   def draw(self, ctx, width, height):
       pass

In the above code stub, we created the Animator class extending the GTK.DrawingArea. Animator class is meant to be an abstract class for the other animators. We defined the size request of the area we want and connected the “draw” signal to the do_drawing method. On notable thing to note here is that, we have “draw” signal on GTK+ 3 while on GTK+2 we have “on_expose” signal. On the creation of the widget, draw signal is fired. In the handler do_drawing method, we receive widget and ctx. Here ctx is the Cairo context. We can perform our drawing with the help of the of Cairo context. We further call the draw method passing the context, width and height of the widget. On notable thing here is that, even though we requested for a size for the widget, allocated size might be different depending upon a number of factors. Thus, drawing must be done according to allocated area instead of the absolute area.

The draw is an abstract method. All the animators must override this method to implement custom drawing on the widget area. Lastly, we add a timeout based call to tick method. This is what drives the animation. This is done with the help of GLib.timeout_add(). Here the first argument is the time in milliseconds after which callback should be fired and second argument is the callback that should be fired. We are calling tick method in the class. It is required for the method to return True if successful for proper functioning. We call queue_draw method from within the tick method. queue_draw leads to invalidation of current area and again generates the draw signal.

Now that we know how the core of the animation will work, let us define some cool animations for the Listening phase of the application. We define the Listening Animator for the same.

class ListeningAnimator(Animator):
   def __init__(self, window, **properties):
       super().__init__(**properties)
       self.window = window
       self.tc = 0

   def draw(self, ctx, width, height):

       self.tc += 0.2
       self.tc %= 2 * math.pi

       for i in range(-4, 5):
           ctx.set_source_rgb(0.2, 0.5, 1)
           ctx.set_line_width(6)
           ctx.set_line_cap(cairo.LINE_CAP_ROUND)
           if i % 2 == 0:
               ctx.move_to(width / 2 + i * 10, height / 2 + 3 - 
                           8 * math.sin(self.tc + i))
               ctx.line_to(width / 2 + i * 10, height / 2 - 3 + 
                           8 * math.sin(self.tc + i))
           else:
               ctx.set_source_rgb(0.2, 0.7, 1)
               ctx.move_to(width / 2 + i * 10, height / 2 + 3 - 
                           8 * math.cos(self.tc - i))
               ctx.line_to(width / 2 + i * 10, height / 2 - 3 + 
                           8 * math.cos(self.tc - i))
               ctx.stroke()

In this we are drawing some lines with round cap to create an effect like below.

Since, the lines must move we are using trigonometric functions to create sinusoidal movement with some phase difference between adjacent lines. To set color of the brush, we use set_source_rgb method. We may then move the pointer to desired position, draw lines or other shapes. Then, we can either fill the shape or draw strokes using the relevant methods. The full list of methods can be accessed here in the official documentation.
After creating the widget, it can be easily added to the UI depending on the type of the container, generally by add method. You may access the full code of SUSI Linux repository to learn more about the usage in SUSI Linux App. The final result can be seen in the following video.

Resources:

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Creating GUI for configuring SUSI Linux Settings

SUSI Linux app provides access to SUSI on Linux distributions on desktop as well as hardware devices like Raspberry Pi. The settings for SUSI Linux are controlled with the use of a config.json file. You may edit the file manually, but to provide safe configurations, we have a config generator script. You may run the script to configure settings like TTS Engine, STT Engine, authentication, choice about the hotword engine etc. Generally, it is easier to configure application settings through a GUI. Thus, we added a GUI for it using PyGTK and Glade.

Glade is a GUI designer for GNOME based Linux systems. I wrote a blog about how to create user interfaces in Glade and access it from Python code in SUSI Linux. Now, for creating UI for Configuration screen, we need to choose an ideal layout. Glade provides various choices like BoxLayout, GridLayout, FlowBox, ListBox , Notebook etc. Since, we need to display only basic settings options, we select the BoxLayout for this purpose.

BoxLayout as the name suggests, forms a box like arrangement for widgets. You can arrange the widgets in either Landscape or Horizontal Layout. We select Application Window as a top-level container and add a BoxLayout container in it. Now, in each box of the BoxLayout, we need to add the widgets like ComboBox and Switch for user’s choice and a Label. This can be done by using a horizontal BoxLayout with corresponding widgets. After arranging the UI in above described manner, we have a GUI like below.

If you see the current window in the preview now, you will find that the ComboBox do not have any items. We need to define items in the ComboBox using a GTKListStore. You may refer to this video tutorial to see how this can be done.

Now, when we see the preview, our GUI is fully functional. We have options for Speech Recognition Service, Text to Speech Service in ComboBox. Other simple settings are available as switches.

Now, we need to add functionality to our UI. We want our code to be modular and structured, therefore, we declare a ConfigurationWindow class. Though the ideal way to handle such cases is inheriting from the Gtk.Window class, but reading the documentation of PyGTK+ 3, I could not find a way to do this for windows created through Glade. Thus, we will use composition for storing the window object. We add window and other widgets present in the UI as properties of ConfigurationWindow class like this.

class ConfigurationWindow:
   def __init__(self) -> None:
       super().__init__()
       builder = Gtk.Builder()
       builder.add_from_file(os.path.join("glade_files/configure.glade"))

       self.window = builder.get_object("configuration_window")
       self.stt_combobox = builder.get_object("stt_combobox")
       self.tts_combobox = builder.get_object("tts_combobox")
       self.auth_switch = builder.get_object("auth_switch")
       self.snowboy_switch = builder.get_object("snowboy_switch")
       self.wake_button_switch = builder.get_object("wake_button_switch")

Now, we need to connect the Signals from our configuration window to the Handler. We declare the Handler as a nested class in the ConfigurationWindow class because its scope of usage is inside the ConfigurationWindow object. Then you may connect signals to an object of the Handler class.

builder.connect_signals(ConfigurationWindow.Handler(self))

Since we may need to modify the state of the widgets, we hold a reference of the parent ConfigurationWindow object in the Handler and pass the self as a parameter to the Handler. You may read more about using the handlers in my previous blog.

In the Handler, we connect to the config.json file and change the parameters of the the file based on the user inputs on the GUI. We handle it for the Text to Speech selection comboBox in the following manner. We also declare two addition Dialogs for handling the input of credentials by the users for the Watson and Bing services.

def on_stt_combobox_changed(self, combo: Gtk.ComboBox):
   selection = combo.get_active()

   if selection == 0:
       config['default_stt'] = 'google'

   elif selection == 1:
       credential_dialog = WatsonCredentialsDialog(self.config_window.window)
       response = credential_dialog.run()

       if response == Gtk.ResponseType.OK:
           username = credential_dialog.username_field.get_text()
           password = credential_dialog.password_field.get_text()
           config['default_stt'] = 'watson'
           config['watson_stt_config']['username'] = username
           config['watson_stt_config']['password'] = password
       else:
           self.config_window.init_stt_combobox()

       credential_dialog.destroy()

   elif selection == 2:
       credential_dialog = BingCredentialDialog(self.config_window.window)
       response = credential_dialog.run()

       if response == Gtk.ResponseType.OK:
           api_key = credential_dialog.api_key_field.get_text()
           config['default_stt'] = 'bing'
           config['bing_speech_api_key']['username'] = api_key
       else:
           self.config_window.init_stt_combobox()

       credential_dialog.destroy()

Now, we declare two more methods to show and exit the Window.

def show_window(self):
   self.window.show_all()
   Gtk.main()

def exit_window(self):
   self.window.destroy()
   Gtk.main_quit()

Now, we may use the ConfigurationWindow class object anywhere from our code. This modularized approach is better when you need to manage multiple windows as you can just declare the Window of a particular type and show it whenever need in your code.

Resources

  • Glade usage Youtube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOGK3TveDDk
  • Creating GUI using PyGTK for SUSI Linux: https://blog.fossasia.org/making-gui-for-susi-linux-with-pygtk/
  • PyGObject Documentation: http://pygobject.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started.html
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Making GUI for SUSI Linux with PyGTK

SUSI Linux app provides access to SUSI on Linux distributions on desktop as well as hardware devices like Raspberry Pi. It started off as a headless client but we decided to add a minimalist GUI to SUSI Linux for performing login and configuring settings. Since, SUSI Linux is a Python App, it was desirable to use a GUI Framework compatible with Python. Many popular GUI frameworks now provide bindings for Python. Some popular available choices are:

wxPython: wxPython is a Python GUI framework based on wxWidgets, a cross-platform GUI library written in C++. In addition to the standard dialogs, it includes a 2D path drawing API, dockable windows, support for many file formats and both text-editing and word-processing widgets. wxPython though mainly support Python 2 as programming language.

PyQT: Qt is a multi-licensed cross-platform framework written in C++. Qt needs a commercial licence for use but if application is completely Open Source, community license can be used. Qt is an excellent choice for GUIs and many applications are based on it.

PyGTK / PyGObject: PyGObject is a Python module that lets you write GUI applications in GTK+. It provides bindings to GObject, a cross platform C library. GTK+ applications are natively supported in most distros and you do not need to install any other development tools for developing with PyGTK.

Comparing all these frameworks, PyGTK was found to meet our needs very well. To make UIs in PyGTK, you have a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor called Glade. Though you can design whole UI programmatically, it is always convenient to use an editor like Glade to simplify the creation and styling of widgets.

To create a UI, you need to install Glade in your specific distribution. After that open glade, and add a Top Level container Window or AppWindow to your app.

Once that is done, you may pick from the available Layout Managers. We are using BoxLayout Manager in SUSI Linux GUIs. Once that is done, add your widgets to the Application Window using Drag and Drop.

Properties of widgets are available on the right panel. Edit your widget properties to give them meaningful IDs so we can address them later in our code. GTK also provides Signals for signaling about a events associated with the widgets. Open the Signals tab in the Widget properties pane. Then, you need to write name of the signal handler for the events associated with Widgets. A signal handler is a function that is fired upon the occurrence of the associated event. For example, we have signals like text_changed in Text Entry boxes, and clicked for Button.

After completing the design of GUI, we can address the .glade file of the UI we just created in the Python code. We can do this using the following snippet.

import gi
gi.require_version('Gtk', '3.0')
from gi.repository import Gtk

builder = Gtk.Builder()
builder.add_from_file("glade_files/signin.glade")

You can reference each widget from the Glade file using its ID like below.

email_field = builder.get_object("email_field")

Now, to handle all the declared signals in the Glade file, we need to make a Handler class. In this class, you need to define call the valid callbacks for your signals. On the occurrence of the signal, respective callback is fired.

class Handler:

   def onDeleteWindow(self, *args):
       Gtk.main_quit(*args)

   def signInButtonClicked(self, *args):
       # implementation

   def input_changed(self, *args):
       # implementation

We may associate a handler function to more than one Signal. For that, we just need to specify the respective function in both the Signals.

Now, we need to connect this Handler to builder signals. This can be done using the following line.

builder.connect_signals(Handler())

Now, we can show our window using the following lines.

window.show_all()
Gtk.main()

The above lines displays the window and start the Gtk main loop. The script waits on the Gtk main loop. The app may be quitted using the Gtk.main_quit() call. Running this script shows the Login Screen of our app like below.

Resources:

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