[Pythoncard-users] Two Pythoncard applications

[Jussi S. <jus...@pp...>]

Apologies for the long post! I've made 2 applications that could 
interest others also.

1. Blood Pressure Monitor (BPM)

BPM is a PythonCard application for storing values of blood pressure 
measurements and for producing PDF charts of those values. The chart can 
be used by the physician of a patient to control the effect of the 
medical treatment being used.

Despite its rather pompous name BPM is a modest, simple to use program. 
All it does could probably have been accomplished easily  by a couple of 
Office macros, but I'm only willing to use tools that include Python or 
at least Py in their names.;)

The purpose was to make
- the data entry fast but still ensure the validity of the data
- the charting in the ideal case happen with a single mouse click

BPM produces a one-page PDF file containing:
- the 'traditional' date-oriented systolic and diastolic pressure graphs
- the scatterplot of (systolic, diastolic) pairs
- the BP value distribution as a bar chart with BP values as X-axis and 
the frequencies of those values as Y-axis.
- the quartiles Q1-Q3 for systolic and diastolic pressures

After that BPM starts Acrobat Reader giving it the name of the file 
produced. The chart can then be viewed and printed or e-mailed as need be.

BPM could serve as an example for developers using Pythoncard of how to 
use wx.Notebook and wx.Grid with Pythoncard. It might also be an example 
of how to do things the hard and wrong way, because part of what I've 
accomplished has been the result of trial-and-error.

Some of the things I would have liked to been able to do I couldn't. For 
example, I would have liked to make the first field 'sDay' of the second 
tabsheet 'Data Chart' to be active when coming to this tab the first 
time after the start and yet to have the first tabsheet 'Data Entry' and 
preferably the (0,0) cell of the grid in it be active. Trying to do this 
resulted in a perverse condition where I had activated the 'Data Entry' 
with 'stringselection' and yet the input focus was in the 'sDay' field 
in the hidden tabsheet 'Data Chart'!


2. A Trick Card Game

This card game belongs to the "plain trick games without trumps" 
category. I'm not aware of its name, so I'll have to describe its rules. 
The game is simple so it is particularly suitable for children.

One player plays against 3 computer players. Each player is dealt a hand 
of 5 cards. A round consists of each player in turn playing one card.

The suit of the leading card determines the suit to play in that round. 
If the player has cards of that suit, he has to play the suit but he is 
not forced to use a higher-valued card. If the player does not have the 
leading suit, any suit can be played. The player with the highest card 
of the round's suit wins the trick getting 1 point.

The game comes with UIs defined for two languages, English and Finnish, 
and with description on how to translate the UI to some other language.


3. Environment and download

The programs have been developed and tested on Windows XP Home SP2 using 
the following great software: Python 2.4.3, wxPython 2.6.3, PythonCard 
0.8.2, PyChart 1.34 and Acrobat Reader 7.0.8. They have a non-essential 
Windows dependence of using winsound with error messages.

They are distributed under the MIT license (see the attached file 
License.txt)

The download page is:
        http://personal.inet.fi/cool/operator/ProgToDownload.html