obbyPY
LIST SORT December 2024
Applying the workarounds I mentioned at the top of this article, I managed, in the end, to produce a largely stable app. Phew! However, there is one remaining little defect that my workarounds do not solve. On rare occasions, the main text box fails to populate. This can sometimes be resolved by clicking on the SORT button a number of times more. But there are cases where the only solution is to upload the current file again. Of course, this event is not registered by the Thonny diagnostic who thinks that everything is normal! I am fairly certain that this is not an error in my coding (though I won't be dogmatic about it). While not actually CAUSING this error, it might be (or must be, I suppose) that my unusual coding is actually PROVOKING it, I don't know. You can take it that I am still working on this little problem.
CONCLUSION December 2024
In all the years I have been programming, NEVER have I produced a single app with known bugs. However, they are up here at bobbypy.com simply because of the time and energy I have spent on them, and that I am reluctant to throw this work away. Hopefully though, the final products are good enough to be of some benefit to their users, and that the imperfections are not too inconvenient.
On this platform, at this time, Python has very serious problems. I do not recommend it for anything other than the production of small, simple apps.
PYTHON/TKINTER December 2024
My experience so far with Python/TKinter, on this platform (LMDE 6), is as follows.
Small, simple apps can be written with few problems.
With larger apps, troubles can be severe. The values of variables, including globals, can just disappear into thin air.
Boxes, such as Lists and Texts, suddenly fail to populate.
Some errors are seemingly impossible to bypass. "Tries" don't always help.
Cases such as the above are not detected at all by diagnostics, or at least not by the app I use (Thonny).
In the larger apps I have produced (see below), I have had to save variables at various points to files on the HD for retrieval at the required time.
Non-standard restarting of the app was used in order to get boxes to begin populating again.
However, in practical terms, one or two errors appear to have no diagnosis or solution.
SPAM GOBBLER December 2024
E-mails can suddenly fail to download, and the app just hangs. This can be because of errors in the data of the e-mails (e.g. bad utf-8 encoding), a server error, etc. Theoretically, I should be able to bypass such errors by using "try-excepts" and so on, but so far I have not managed to get them to work properly for all cases. This can be because of my lack of experience in using Python, but I am fairly convinced that errors in Python itself (or bad Python handling policies) are involved.
Regarding usage, this causes slightly different problems for POP3 accounts and IMAP accounts. If the app persistenly hangs under POP3, the user can go to his/her main e-mail app, which has superior routines for handling errors, and download everything from the account. Once the offending e-mail has been removed from the server, my PY Spam Gobbler will work normally again. But it is a slightly different kettle of fish for IMAP accounts where the user's main e-mail app does not normally remove the messages from the server. I am currently thinking of offering the use of my old Spam Gobbler app to IMAP users so that they can clear offending messages from the server, but I have not done it yet because it is obviously a very clumsy solution! At the moment, I am still trying to find a more elegant solution.
