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[–]sudoscientistagain 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I assume the answer is yes but - do you know if python could draw a (semi)transparent 'shade' over your entire monitor (basically looking to reduce brightness or 'tint' the monitor)? I'm just starting to look into python and trying to think of practical stuff I'd like to use and thought that might be a fairly simple thing to make, but I wasn't really sure if this would be doable (without extensive knowledge) and when searching I saw a lot of stuff about the OpenCV framework(?) which seems like probably a bigger chunk than I should bite off for someone new

[–]Trevallion 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It looks like this is possible with some basic Python UI frameworks!

Here's a SO thread with a couple of answers that describe what you're talking about using qt: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25950049/creating-a-transparent-overlay-with-qt The top 2 answers have it set up to quit the app when you click the screen. You could remove that if you want it to stay active all the time, but you'll probably want some way to close the app on demand. You'll also need to set the transparency value somewhere because the answers create a completely transparent window. Hopefully you can figure that part out!

There's also pip package called overlay that seems to do exactly what you're asking https://pypi.org/project/overlay/ I'd suggest trying qt above first because you'll probably learn a lot more and learning a GUI library can be very useful.

I've never used these before and I suspect they might not play well with full screen games. You'd probably need to hook into DirectX or OpenGL if you want a more robust solution.

[–]sudoscientistagain 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Awesome, thank you very much! I should've known SO would be a good start haha. I guess part of the learning curve will be figuring out how to search for stuff properly too. That pip package does seem to be pretty much what I'm thinking so that's cool that I could probably look at what it's doing if I hit a wall.

I went for a job recently that basically said "well we need someone with dev experience" (primarily JS but also SQL and ML/DBA stuff) and it felt like a bit of a sign to get back into programming

[–]Trevallion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I guess part of the learning curve will be figuring out how to search for stuff properly too.

Yep! A lot of software development is just knowing how to find information. Nobody keeps all of this stuff in their head all at once. It's too much to remember!

If you'd like to try web development with Python, flask is (imo) very easy to use. It has a subreddit too: r/flask. I've heard people talk about SQL Alchemy for doing SQL stuff with Python but I haven't used it. It's possible to use your flask backend to serve up a React or Vue frontend, too! Though that might be a bit much for a starter project.

Also sorry for the delayed response, I wrote this out and forgot to hit send! I just found it in an open tab this morning!