embryo is a tiny Mac/Windows/Linux GUI toolkit for Python. It can be used to "boot-strap" the user into downloading a larger GUI toolkit such as PyGTK, PyGame, pyglet, PyOpenGL, etc.

Features

There are two main functions:

• message_box() displays an alert dialog to the user and waits for them to close it. It can contain either a single OK button, or an OK and a Cancel button.
• open_url() opens a website in the user's default web browser.

There are several convenience functions for checking that a minimum version of a package is installed. For example, to check that PyGame 1.7 or later is installed:

import embryo
if not embryo.check_pygame('1.7'):
   # Exit.

Usage

embryo.py is less than 4kb compressed. Drop the latest version into your project and import it as shown above. Don't bother requiring users to install it -- that defeats its whole purpose!

Documentation

The embryo.py file is documented within itself. There are several example programs in the SVN trunk.

Requirements

embryo requires Windows 98 or later, Linux with GTK-2.0 or later, or Mac OS X 10.1 or later. Any version of Python post-2.3 should be OK, but GUI functionality requires ctypes (so Python 2.5 is recommended). If ctypes is not available, embryo will still work, but will write messages to standard out.

License &c

embryo is provided under the BSD license, making it suitable for open-source and commercial projects with little restriction. If you have any queries or patches, contact Alex Holkner at Alex.Holkner@gmail.com.