infinite loop + gui freezes the program

[xfroggy]

Alright guys, If someone could give me some ideas or examples if possible since I'm really stuck on this one without a clue how to proceed. I'm trying to write a little logging program for my scanner, but I'm stuck with infinite loop. Still new to programming, but I got myself to dead end. I want my program to have infinite loop when I press the toggle button and the info to display in labels in my gui. I got that by clicking a button, but whenever I try doing it with infinite loop, my gui freezes. What can I do so that the gui wont freeze?

Here's my code

def currentStatus():
    ser.write("STS\r")
    return ser.read(139).split(",")
 
class mainApp:
    def __init__(self):
 
        # Set the Glade file
        self.gladefile = "gladeSerialProject.glade"
        self.wTree = gtk.glade.XML(self.gladefile)
 
        # Create dictionary
        signals = { "on_mainWindow_destroy" : gtk.main_quit, \
            "on_button1_clicked"        : self.labelTest, \
            "on_togglebutton1_toggled"    : self.toggleButton }
 
        # connect to the dictionary
        self.wTree.signal_autoconnect(signals)
 
    # Test withi label
    def labelTest(self, widget):
        self.wTree.get_widget("label1").set_text(currentStatus()[6])
 
    #-------------Freezes    
    def toggleButton(self, widget):
        if widget.get_active():
            while True:
                self.wTree.get_widget("label1").set_text(currentStatus()[6])
            else: print "Press to start"
 
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    mainApp = mainApp()
    gtk.main()

[bartonc]

I'm not familiar with GTK, but all gui packages have something like Update() that forces an update event into the event queue. That's how you prevent "tight loops" from freezing the GUI parts of your program.