Speakers: Bryson Tyrrell
Level: Intermediate, Hands-on (BYOD for attendees)
Excerpt: Instead of using a binary or toolkit you need to deploy to a device to present a custom window to your end users, write a Python script that generates the GUI on the fly with loads of options for interaction.
Description: Mac admins usually need to prompt their end users for some sort of interaction when running a script. A simple dialog prompt with a two or three button options, or maybe a single text box, can be achieved by leveraging AppleScript. Once you want to go beyond these options you run into limitations that require you to jump to a third-party tool such as CocoaDialog which require you to deploy and maintain across your fleet.
But what if there was another option that was already present on every Mac that allows complex GUIs where you could capture all sorts of user input and then use it for whatever actions you needed?
Enter Tkinter: a Python library that allows you to leverage the Tcl/Tk GUI toolkit and create custom dialogs on the fly. Not only can you create windows with multiple inputs, checkboxes, radio selectors, pick lists and comment boxes, but because you’re working in Python using the standard library you don’t have to worry about pre-installing or managing anything. “It just works.”
About the speakers
Bryson Tyrrell – Desktop Services Specialist – JAMF Software (Twitter: @bryson3gps)
Bryson Tyrrell is an IT professional from the Twin Cities. He works at JAMF Software and uses the Casper Suite internally to manage and support the organization’s OS X and IOS devices. In past years he has presented at the JAMF Nation User Conference (2011, 2015) and Atlassian Summit (2015) as well as presenting on various topics to the Mac admin communities Macbrained and Twin Cities Mac Admins to which he is a co-founder. You can normally find Bryson in the Mac Admins Slack group (check in channel #jamfnation).