And then, I was slacking off while studying for my final and out of nowhere I found PyInstaller‘s explicit support for PyQt and its recent support for the mac. And after trying, almost everything works out without much of a kink. Credit goes to ChrisWayg who produced an amazingly complete and up-to-date set of instructions to follow. I’m merely telling how my application did using his instructions (April 2010) and hopefully doing my part to draw more attention to the excellent PyInstaller.

My Application

A PyQt application to help photographers apply custom watermarks in a manual but in an assisted way.

Uses:

• PIL 1.1.7
• Qt4 4.6.2
• PyQt4 4.7.2
• SIP 4.10.1

All from MacPorts on Python 2.6.5, OSX 10.6.3.

Prepare PyInstaller

PyInstaller is kinda special in that it’s not installed anywhere. It’s just a bunch of Python scripts that work on stuff in place. While you’re at it, read the manual.

svn co http://svn.pyinstaller.org/trunk ~/PyInstaller

Or put it somewhere you want.

Then you need to build the bootloaders. If you’re making PyQt applications, you probably have XCode already. Anyway, you need it.

cd source/linux
python Make.py
make
cd ..
python Configure.py

Making your Application

So far, PyInstaller has a problem of not showing your application at the front when you run it. You can fix it in your own code by adding

form.raise_()

right after

form.show()

with “form” being whatever you called your instance of MainWindow().

Like with py2app, you gotta first make a “spec file”.

python Makespec.py --onefile /path/to/YourApplication.py

This will make a YourApplication/YourApplication.spec file in your PyInstaller folder.
To make it work on mac, add

import sys
if sys.platform.startswith("darwin"):
    app = BUNDLE(exe,
                 appname='WhateverYouWantToCallIt',
                 version=1)

at the bottom.

For my application, it made 70 files inside the .app file on default. –onefile makes it more neat and 3 times smaller in size! but it does make it a bit slower. If you care to make it as fast as possible, leave out that option but you have to fix a bug yourself.

Finally, build the application!

python Build.py YourApplication/YourApplication.spec

This will make your application and leave a YourApplication.app in your PyInstaller folder.

Fix the Application

Put your own nice icon on the application. Copy your graphic, right-click your application and choose Get Info, click the icon and paste the graphic.

Open the content of your application, open Contents/Info.plist, uncheck “Application is background only” and save. If you’re using a plain text editor, change LSBackgroundOnly to false.

There is only one last problem to deal with on mac. You have to copy the qt_menu.nib file.

locate qt_menu.nib

to find it. If you use MacPorts, it’s probably somewhere like /opt/local/libexec/qt4-mac/lib/QtGui.framework/Versions/4/Resources/qt_menu.nib

Copy it to your YourApplication.app/Contents/Resources

Boom, you can double click your application and it will run!

Ok, one last problem, I swear. When you run, it shows 2 icons on the dock… pretty ugly. This hack can fix it, but it’s not perfect as it leaves junk on your computer. Hopefully PyInstaller can address it soon.

Conclusion

The program is beautiful! You don’t have to worry about your Python plug-ins, your 64-bitness, anything (mostly). It just works. I have yet to figure out how to make 32-bit binaries on 64-bit systems and how to make upx work properly to reduce executable size. I’m currently running at 32mb for an application that really should be 1mb. But then again, it’s packaging a whole new GUI framework that doesn’t exist on the target computer with the application. Consider Skype (yes, it’s infinitely more complex than my thing), it is still 43mb.

1. Get the latest versions of PyQt and SIP. You need Qt installed of course.
2. Configure SIP using

python configure.py --arch i386

3. Configure PyQt using

python configure.py --use-arch=i386

4. Finally, make sure your python is running in 32-bit mode because current Qt doesn’t support 64-bit mode. Add

   export VERSIONER_PYTHON_PREFER_32_BIT=yes

   to your .bash_profile in your home directory

5. If your Python still refuses to run in 32 bit mode, try

   arch -i386 python

First we subclass a QListWidget to handle events

class DragDropListWidget(QListWidget):
	def __init__(self, type, parent=None):
		super(DragDropListWidget, self).__init__(parent)
		self.setAcceptDrops(True)
		self.setIconSize(QSize(72, 72))
 
	def dragEnterEvent(self, event):
		if event.mimeData().hasUrls:
			event.accept()
		else:
			event.ignore()
 
	def dragMoveEvent(self, event):
		if event.mimeData().hasUrls:
			event.setDropAction(Qt.CopyAction)
			event.accept()
		else:
			event.ignore()
 
	def dropEvent(self, event):
		if event.mimeData().hasUrls:
			event.setDropAction(Qt.CopyAction)
			event.accept()
			l = []
			for url in event.mimeData().urls():
				l.append(str(url.toLocalFile()))
			self.emit(SIGNAL("dropped"), l)
		else:
			event.ignore()

The initialiser simply allows drops into the widget. It also makes sure thumbnails are well visible.

Then each event performs a check to make sure the object being dropped is indeed a file. Finally, at the drop, the class sends an event with a list of local files dropped. Of course all handling could be done within the class but I will eventually need to manage dropped files in a parent form so an event is used here.

self.connect(self.pictureListWidget, SIGNAL("dropped"), self.pictureDropped)

In the parent class, I first connect the signal I defined in the custom list widget.

def pictureDropped(self, l):
	for url in l:
		if os.path.exists(url):
			picture = Image.open(url)
			picture.thumbnail((72, 72), Image.ANTIALIAS)
			icon = QIcon(QPixmap.fromImage(ImageQt.ImageQt(picture)))
			item = QListWidgetItem(os.path.basename(url)[:20] + "...", self.pictureListWidget)
			item.setStatusTip(url)
			item.setIcon(icon)

Here the Image and ImageQt modules of PIL are used to process the images. The Image class can help to create a thumbnail of the opened image. ImageQt can then convert the Image class into an ImageQt class which is a subclass of QImage. QIcons can only be constructed from QPixmap so we build one from the ImageQt class and send it to make a QIcon.

There you go, you now have a working list widget which allow image files to be dropped and can list them with thumbnail.

Of course, this snippet doesn’t check for other file types being dropped. More code would take away the focus.

Qt Creator

This is a collection of tutorials I found useful to get into the Qt framework. Being more used to the Microsoft standard, I have always wanted to branch into more cross-platform stuff so that I can at least write tools and programs for my Mac. I never really liked the idea of “reinventing the wheels” feel of C++ unless it was on an embedded system so Python looked like a solid contender to the rather messy Perl.

In terms of interface, the choice is rather broad for Python but after trying a bit of Cocoa, TkInter, wxPython and GTK, nothing can quite give the clean and organized feel of Qt.

A solid start for Qt (which is written for C++) is always to go through the official 500+ pages book for Qt and C++. Luckily, the book’s available online from the Qt website. Too bad they’ve made it not very obvious to get to from the start page.

Then you can go through some more task-specific tutorials or get straight into PyQt:

• http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/designer-manual.html a manual for the neat Qt Designer tool that is available from the Qt website. There’s the YouTube videos that go with it as well.
• http://www.commandprompt.com/community/pyqt/book1 slightly dated but a very solid source with vast amounts of examples
• http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/python/ another nice set of tutorials that goes through scenarios with you
• http://vizzzion.org/?id=pyqt a really simple 5 minute tutorial with Qt and Python
• http://www.zetcode.com/tutorials/pyqt4/ short and sweet, although it could leave you wanting more
• You can check out my tutorial on creating thumbnail list via drag-drop for a quick get shit done guide

But nothing can compare with the wealth of information that’s available in the Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt book. It is simply my best recommendation.

Here’s a tutorial for deploying PyQt applications on Mac.