I came across this hint about display properties on StackOverflow and thought it was worthwhile to write down for later. If you want to get the screen or Desktop resolution of a Mac via Python, you can do so with PyObjC.
First, let’s get the information about the main screen:
>>> print(NSScreen.mainScreen().frame())
<NSRect origin=<NSPoint x=0.0 y=0.0> size=<NSSize width=1920.0 height=1200.0>>
If you want just the horizontal and vertical resolution from that blob of data, you can pull the width and height out:
1920.0
>>> print(NSScreen.mainScreen().frame().size.height)
1200.0
>>> width, height = NSScreen.mainScreen().frame().size.width, NSScreen.mainScreen().frame().size.height
>>> width, height
(1920.0, 1200.0)
This might be useful in situations where you don’t have any of the “hundred of portable libs in Python that give you access to that information” — such as in your stock Mac OS X Python installation. To clarify: I’m in no way meaning to belittle that there are portable libraries that would let you do the same thing, but you also have to program for your audience and its constraints. One of the reasons I appreciate Python over some scripting languages is that you get so much capability in the Standard Library. However, on Mac OS X, you don’t get modules like pygame by default (yet … and maybe never) while you do get PyObjC.