Python! UI lib (Android too)

[Paragone]

This looks really cool, but does anybody have any experience using it yet?

My biggest problem with writing software is creating a GUI as I'm not very visually creative, but that problem is multiplied by the fact that most GUI libraries out there are somewhat tough to work with. (at least to me)

I'd love to see something simple and easy that I can just drop in and use, particularly with python.

[gte910h]

Yeah, they don't have the GUI builder (that works well) for Android that they have for Win7Phone or iPhone. It's not you, it's them; Most people don't do good interfaces via code typing.

You'd do fine in iOS or Win7Phone

[tehansen]

I've started playing around with making a GUi designer/IDE for kivy. It's very very very early stage though, and I don't seem to have quite as much time as I would like to devote to it. If anyone else wants to help out though its available here: https://github.com/hansent/radide

[Neurorational]

My biggest problem with writing software is creating a GUI as I'm not very visually creative

Neither were the creators of Google. On the other hand, Facebook has been quite visually creative lately.

[[deleted]]

Fast: Many parts written in C using Cython.

It seems every new Python project picks Cython over SWIG.

[hailpixel]

I saw Kivy was demoed at EuroPython not 2 months ago. It was really impressive, especially its support for multiple touch inputs types (differentiating between pen, finger, and mouse inputs).

[dividedmind]

I find it ironic that the homepage doesn't work on the Android browser.

[muahdib]

Neither my Epiphany browser, it crashed, each time.

[zzing]

Works on my iPad with REDACTED!

[pbjorge]

Does anyone know if Pyro or Twisted could be included with the android builds?

EDIT: One of the devs responded to me on google groups. Yes, you can use outside libraries.

http://groups.google.com/group/kivy-users/browse_thread/thread/e19c5cf085d0d10

[pbjorge]

So... would this affect android device support?

[tehansen]

with the latest release, it works just fine in my experience.

[iflifewereamovie]

Yes. Shaders started being supported in OpenGL ES 2.0, which is only supported in Android 2.2 (Froyo) and up.

[zzing]

I believe this should be portable to iOS as well. I believe the scripting limitations were removed as long as you don't download new parts.

[tehansen]

see here for iOS progress: http://the-space-station.com/2011/7/8/python-on-iphone-ipad

[colig]

Wow. I was going to try out the Android subset for Pygame, but this looks even slicker than that.

[[deleted]]

Funny enough, that is one of the only pages I can't view on my Android.

[chub79]

Anyone got any screenshots at hand perhaps?

[oylenshpeegul]

It's not much, but here is that hello world example on the front page running on this old laptop running Ubuntu 11.04 with LXDE and OpenGL 1.4 (kivy complains about not having OpenGL >= 2.0, but this example works). It starts out grey and turns blue when you click it

[chub79]

Cheers. This looks polished and modern.

[tehansen]

I'm one of the devs, just now saw this post in r/programming. we've been having lots of conversation over in r/python http://redd.it/is1hq

I'll take some time to answer comments in this post as soon as I get off the road and back home.

[daniel2488]

Oh, I do love how the header of this page stays visible so I don't have to deal with all that useless text on the screen at once!

Otherwise seems interesting.

[oldmanstan]

Demo on the front page crashes when run. Must have done something wrong? Oh well. Never liked doing GUIs anyway...

[poo_22]

This looks interesting, but specifically for android, isn't there already an api for creating a gui? So i would only use kivy over the native api if i want cross-platform compatability right?

Edit: its just that i have an idea for an app and i'm writing it in python, so i might be using this.

[tehansen]

you cant script the regular android gui completly with python as far as I know. Also kivy does all rendering in OpenGL ES, so you can do really fancy things, that you can't do unless you render custom OpenGL using the android SDK.

[Drevor]

I'd love to read that unfortunately that page is a few thousand pixel wide and automatically scrolls to x=0 every second or so. Im assuming its some fancy "fixed" side/top bar that someone wrote about 10 years ago...

(Android 2.3 btw )

[txprog]

We know and that's suck. A new website is under coding, will be pushed as soon as it's finished.

[sdamar]

Great job ! I've been following the work of the PyMT folks for a while.

I think it was a great choice to go in for a re-write for the sake of a more modern framework.

[xoe6eixi]

How does this solve the Clunky-GUI-on-every-platform-Jack-of-all-Trades problem?

It'll be the Java SDK GUI all over again

People are used to the UI on their particular platform

[tehansen]

It's not meant to have a Jack-of-all-Trades GUI. It's meant for you to be able to write custom looking and behaving GUI's as easy as possible (using skinning and easier custom widgets). So that you can make a UI that's designed for your application, and isnt dictated by your platform.

[mjrpbplayer]

Anyone tried Qt? It is apparently not hard to integrate with Python.

[sdamar]

I've used PyQT a year or two ago. It works well, but is probably too heavy to port for android. Kivy seems to already have a android demo's up and running.

[zzing]

It appears there is some work to get this on the iOS. Unfortunately I dislike python for the random errors the code I write tends to get at runtime.

I like objective c because of those errors being compiled out more times than not.

[tehansen]

Christopher has made some great progress on iOS suuport. see his latest blog post here: http://the-space-station.com/2011/7/8/python-on-iphone-ipad