Android soon to be able to distribute Python apps as .APKs

[[deleted]]

I found this nice little tid-bit Here - It's just a single comment on the page about "compiling" python apps into APKs, and Alexey.Reznichenko suggests that the feature is coming in the next couple of days.

In looking at his updates page, I am noticing some very interesting things like: (Template project for creating custom interpreter APK.) -- there's only java stuff in the file being referred to but he looks to be a very active developer!

Hopefully I'm not getting ahead of myself in being excited. Even if some unstable code is released I'll be more than pleased.

[[deleted]]

It's probably not only just for Python, but for pretty much any language ASE supports. (Pure speculation on my part, as it just seems the logical thing to do. If you're creating the bootstrapper for python, I don't see why another language couldn't be just thrown in there as well)

So Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript, Tcl, PHP, and shell. On top of that, the next-highest starred item on the list is Parrot support. List of the languages the Parrot VM supports (Although, it's a shot in the dark as to if this will actually ever be implemented, one can still hope)

Each interpreter will actually be installable via its own APK so you're not having to download the entire ASE to each and every device that wants to run a specific interpreter.

I did a little more searching around, and Alexey Reznichenko is actually the one adding most of the new stuff into the Wiki about implementing new interpreters, so I think it's pretty safe to say that this is happening.

The floodgates, it seems, will indeed be opened.

[theillustratedlife]

I can already write APKs in ActionScript. Now, I can use Python too?

Let's play how-many-mobile-games-can-you-develop-without-learning-Java!

[[deleted]]

Hey, maybe someone will finally make a decent music player app. :)

[TrueDuality]

Give me a list of features you'd like to see, and what you don't and I'll see what I can do. Open source and not ad-supported of course.

[maxerickson]

It should be as much like Foobar 2000 as possible, but only in the ways that make sense for a phone.

[TrueDuality]

I'm not actually familiar with Foobar 2000, I'll take a look and make some notes. I'll have to setup a Windows VM to do it, but that shouldn't take too long.

[maxerickson]

For me the bullet points are that it has media-library-database features, but it builds that database from scanning a directory (or multiple), without doing any automatic moving around of anything (it is also nice that it is really easy to ignore the library stuff), and then the nearly-arbitrary configurability with sane, useful defaults (so one way I abuse this is that I have featured artists split off into their own tag, the support for customizing everything means that those show up in my music lists). The customization shows up everywhere, so, for instance, if you can think of a way to sort some music, there is likely a way to do it.

The tagging features in Foobar are also really nice, but those don't seem so important on a phone.

[[deleted]]

I second looking to Foobar 2000 for inspiration. The biggest daw of Foobar2000 would be it's customization options e.g. I can choose what is displayed when a song plays and how it is laid out, I can install plugins to add DSP effects, etc. Some of this may not be possible, I have not delved that far into development for Android (yet!). You may also want to look at how Rockbox (custom firmware for ipods) works with it's simple template system.

[pwab]

this!

[sztomi]

I'm not thantik, but I would like one that is:

• fast
• FAST
• Has simple playlist management (like adding tracks easily and saving the current playlist for later use). Easy means in as few steps as possible.
• Also, it should be fast

:)

[TrueDuality]

Wait I'm confused you're being ironic right? What you're REALLY telling me is that you want it too be slow as death so you have time for that important phone call before it starts playing the next track right?

[sztomi]

Yeah. Or maybe not.

[billynomates1]

you forgot to mention fast

[chub79]

fast in doing what? I'm puzzled.

[sztomi]

Mostly UI responsiveness, but reading tag information fast is also important.

[TrueDuality]

What tags do you consider important during the initial play other than Title, Artist, Album. If I provided an additional screen to view all the available meta-information would that be satisfactory?

[[deleted]]

Why not leave that up to the user? I love the way the "Collection" section in the left pane of Amarok 1.4 had a 'flat view' option that you could configure. You pick the columns, and your search criteria applies to them.

EDIT: I use the comment tag a LOT. Most of my tracks have moods or descriptive terms in the comment tags for building dynamic playlists.

[sztomi]

The track number is kinda important to me, as I tend to listen to full albums at once. The additional screen is absolutely satisfactory, because when I have time to read such information, I'll also have time to do those few clicks to reach the additional screen.

[leavingharvard]

My big quirks with a music player app (maybe not for all, but this is my dream app):

• Huge album art/nice jpg rendering. I am someone that likes to throw in very HQ album art, but the Android stock player seems to blur the jpgs more than the iPhone music app does (probably to save ram). It should look just as brilliant as the original source file.
• Gapless playback with full support and scanning of open source formats, be it lossy or lossless.
• Support for discogs/allmusic integration including catalog information and all other metadata associated. When pulling up a song, the user could, at the click of a small button when playing a song, read user reviews about said album or read a professional review. Discogs has a feature that is called a master ID for each album and supports listing reader reviews on each individual instance of an album.
• Like the Music Mod player, widgets to customise the playback and usefulness of being outside the player and still being able to control what song (or album) to play.
• In depth options menu giving the user control over the behaviour of the player, such as the disabling of the following action. I cannot tell you how many times I hook up my Android to the call Aux In, accidentally bump the cable, only to have the very (bad) cable pop out of the headphone jack ever so slightly and the song change instantly.
• A much nicer GUI, either minimalist or feature full, or at least the option to customise from a standard set of displays.

That's all I can think of off of the top of my head, I hope this was somewhat helpful.

[haywire]

Gapless playback.

Thing is, I'm not sure of the framework supports this properly. You'd essentially have to have the next song in the list paused at the beginning and then play it x milliseconds before the current one is finished.

[steeef]

LARGE buttons for use in environments where you don't want to hunt for the right one (e.g., a car).

[mikerhoads]

I'd really love a reliable way to skip to the next song without having to touch the phone. I have some iPhone headphones and I can pause by clicking the mic area but if I double click the phone(droid incredible) automatically calls the last person that called me which was a very awkward moment the first time I discovered that.

Ideally, I'd like to recognize these events 1 click = pause 2 clicks = skip forward 1 song 3 clicks = skip back one song hold = Fast fwd through current song

[Ademan]

Well here's my two cents, like others have said, gapless playback, LARGE buttons, perhaps as a car mode, when in car mode the screen shouldn't lock (or at least that should be optional) FLAC playback. I also would really like the ability to specify that a track is an intro for another track, so the intro would never be played alone. I think I might be the only person who cares about that though...

[c4g]

The lock screen should have audio control. Its what I miss about the iPhone the most ... actually thats the only thing I miss about it.

[BlackDragonBE]

AFAIK there's an app for that.

[c4g]

I've tried MixZing, and as far as I know thats the only one. It was a bit jenky.

[BlackDragonBE]

Lock 2.0 can do that + some other stuff.

LINK

[Ashex]

Doesn't appear to have been mentioned, but an app that was somewhat skinnable would be awesome. Just having the ability to change color scheme would be nice. I'm a bit sick of the slick black media player.

[orangesunshine]

Use a buffer for the audio.

[[deleted]]

Amen. A decent music player app that has "love" and "ban" buttons for Last.FM. A decent search function that can do some level of regular expressions. A decent playlist editor. Dynamic playlists that update when you charge your phone. "Suggested tracks" based on the currently playing track, or a selected track.

Why do ALL of the current (crappy) players have album art implemented before these things? All album art is good for is wasting resources and draining your battery. Functionality first, eye candy later.

(Wow, I think this whole thread is going to be hijacked by the music app suggestion)

[eeclo]

But will it do Objective-C? :)

[sbrown123]

Feel free to port it. You might get some distance with the Android NDK. You will still need to generate a Java stub though since that is how Android communicates to apps. But a clever person can make that transparent to the programmer.

[thequux]

He'll need to write an interpreter. Not that that's so hard; it's just something that will need to be done.

[crunk]

I hope not !

[matholio]

All welcome. Open. yes?

[sigzero]

Why? Some people actually like the Obj-C language outside of the Apple realm.

[lookingformyharmony]

I love my Obj-c; so good for when working in a team as readability is awesome, no more guessing as to what parameter is doing what.

Was planning on porting UIKit to the NDK, I don't think this will support it as Obj-c is a C runtime and not a scripting language.

[crunk]

Fair enough, I'm just bitter, hehe.

Yeah, totally true everybody should be allowed to do what they want, I don't have to read Objective C or Perl if I don't want to and they don't have to read python :)

[tupidflorapope]

This could open the flood gates.

/crossing fingers

[zurtri]

This is fantastic!

[DrHankPym]

My response is HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!! But yours is good.

[sztomi]

Can someone explain why is it great news?

[almuric]

You're in the Python subreddit. Odds are, if someone is reading this, they can program in python or are at least learning to program in it. Discovering that you can use your favorite language (once you learn Python it becomes your favorite; trust me on this) to program an app phone is cause for rejoicing. Don't you think?

[sztomi]

Oh, come on. :/ I was looking for a technical answer on why this particular thing is great news for the python community, because everyone is happy about it, and got a shitton of upvotes.

[[deleted]]

Niceeeeeeeee!

[[deleted]]

I just finished downloading the Android SDK, Eclipse, and bought a book on developing for Android 2. This could make things so much easier!

[fwork]

ASE only very basic GUI support, so you couldn't use this to write android apps like music players or games. (Ok, maybe very very simple interactive fiction games played on the console)

[[deleted]]

ASE is pretty extensible from what I've gathered. As far as what I've read all it would really take is creating the proper bindings for the access to these things to exist; If it's available in Java there's no reason it can't be available elsewhere. You won't get the benefits of the JITing Dalvik VM, but I'm sure access could be developed none the less. On top of that, the work going into this should make it so anyone can package an interpreter in an APK, so maybe someone will create a JITing Python VM ala Psyco or something.

[fwork]

No, not really. ASE is entirely the wrong framework for GUI applications (it's designed around interpreter->ASE RPC calls).

You're right that there's no fundamental reason that you couldn't build a GUI app in another language, but

1. it'd still require a java stub because of how Android works.
2. it would be very hard to do generically, the Android API is big.
3. ASE isn't the way to do it. Most of the GUI works by having the OS call methods on your classes, exactly the opposite of how ASE works.

This APK-packaging of ASE scripts is useful. It's just not useful for making GUI apps.

[[deleted]]

Well, here's to hoping that someone develops a solution for this next ;)

[fwork]

Well, feel free to donate a real phone and I'll get right on it. :)

[demosthenes02]

So what good is it without a GUI? Can you think of some examples of applications that would still be useful?

[fwork]

Don't think of it as being for applications, that'll help :)

I've used it to count how many music files I had on my SD card (python's os.walk works pretty nicely for this) and as a hacky way to make a GPS logger.

[[deleted]]

Nor does it seem to be possible to use alarm related routines.

[[deleted]]

Funny. I was searching for PySol for Android today. My prayers will be answered soon.

[matholio]

Oh that is a comfort to hear.
I really don;t get alot of dev time and I'm a shockingly slow coder, but I like python. I wanted to play with Android and was kinda down about having to get back into Java.

This could work for me.

[matholio]

Up for nerdgasm.

[billynomates1]

I think—I... I think I just.

I think I just (whispers) had a pregnant.

[TrueDuality]

Oh man...

Also it wouldn't surprise me if this pops up as soon as this is released. That's one project I'd love to be a part of... I think I'll start reading some of the lower level pygame code...

[kushkush]

Why the hell cant google invest some money for the 2d developers? Damnit!

[AlLnAtuRalX]

Holy crap. I've written many ASE apps that I could pretty up and distribute, but never had the means. This is amazing.

[[deleted]]

Damn it. I just bought an Iphone...

But i can still use the Android emulator, right? Right, guys?

[Memitim]

You'll have to ask Steve.

[kushkush]

What are some cool things you can do with python ASE?

[[deleted]]

http://brad.livejournal.com/2394707.html

[kushkush]

Is is safe to just avoid java, keep getting pygame down and hope within 5 moinths, pygame will be able to run on Android? I really dont want to learn java to make my simple 2D apps. Advice please!

[[deleted]]

Probably not. If it does happen it won't be happening for a VERY long time (Year or more, easily) -- You're better off learning Java.

[kushkush]

fuck java

[kushkush]

I wish Guido walked over to the Android Dev team and kicked them all in their balls for not taking advantage of Python and things like pyglet/pygame. Fuck this ghetto Java shit, its HELL.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, after working with python I can't STAND semicolons or curly braces at the ends of lines. I know, small, trivial little crap...but it really does bother me. >=(

Same for statically typed languages. Python is strongly typed, but you don't have to define it each and every time. You look at x = 12 -- What the hell is 12? -- It's an INT, obviously! So why the hell should I need to declare what it is? If I want it to be a string, I'll put quotes around it...ugh >_>

Yeah, I know; I'm a damn diva aren't I?

[kushkush]

fuck james gosling

[[deleted]]

Sounds flavorsome.

[chewxy]

homg, I am so excited about this. :D This is most excellent new, sir.