A real newbie question here.
I'm using IDLE 2.7.2 on OSX 10.7.2 and reading Zelle's Python:Programming. I haven't programmed since the 80's, so after going through the command line stuff, I'm excited to dive into Objects. I grab his graphics.py file and copy it into documents (this seems like the default location for IDLE) and start up IDLE.
He then suggests a few commands into the shell:
from graphics import *
win = GraphWin() #which opens a graphics window with no problem 
He then goes on to have you draw some lines and shapes in the window. Those graphics show up just fine in the window.
Here's my problem. If I try to mouse over the graphics window, I get the Mac pinwheel. Moving the window doesn't help. So the window seems like it's crashing (though IDLE is doing fine), but strangely, if I keep entering commands into IDLE, the shapes keep drawing normally in the window.
Am I doing something wrong? Is this normal? Thanks,
Henry
Idle runs the python commands you enter in another process, so it's reasonable to expect this "lock up" behavior to be different between the program controlled window and Idle.
What's probably going on, though is that everything is fine, but you have not yet started the event loop in the program you're typing in.  The operating system notices that the program is not emptying out its event queue when you mouse over it (which creates lots of events) and it's helpfully informing you (by way of the pinwheel) that the program seems to be busy.
You will likely reach a point later in the tutorial where you do start the event loop, and the pinwheel will magically go away.
Graphics Window Crashing in IDLE