Devlog #4: Moving to ttkbootstrap + adding a “Build this!“button

Heyyyy! I was gonna write this devlog yesterday, but it was getting kinda late, so I decided to do it toady.

So here’s what’s new: First of all, I switched the app over from plain tkinter widgets to ttkbootstrap, to basically just make things easier. Before, the “Generate ideas!” button was just a label pretending to be a button, with custom hover colors and click bindings, because MacOS (my operating system) was applying an ugly outdated gray/silverish button with no styling, and I wasn’t able to change it.

The switch was relatively smooth, since for most commands, I just had to change the prefix from tk. to tb. Only problem was that these new widgets don’t take bg=/fg= like my previous ones did, so I had to define named styled in the beginning instead. I also added a difficulty field in the beginning, so the user can control the difficulty level of the project ideas, and also a progress bar along with the cycling messages, so the user actually knows when the Ai is thinking.

I also gave each card a “Build this! button, which once pressed, sends another prompt to the ai asking for a full guide, including components, wiring, build instructions, and code if needed. I ran into some errors along the way, mostly typos, which I debugged with the help of Ai.

Next time I’ll give the build guide it’s own screen instead of sitting underneath the entry fields, and make the colors of the app consistent between all the screens. That’s it for now, see you on the next devlog!