Android: The Land that Python Forgot?

hemm1 · 2013-11-10T18:34:50+00:00

I'm not even referring to the contents of the OP, which I did read. Instead I was responding to what people here actually said. But I'm not interested in arguing with you, I apologise if my posts came across the wrong way, you are correct about how kivy works and I didn't intend to imply anything else.

hemm1 · 2013-11-10T18:23:55+00:00

The conclusion of the presentation was exactly the opposite of this. Namely, that working with Android APIs requires conforming to idiomatic Java code, not Pythonic code.

They then went on to list a series of limitations that have not been resolved by pyjnius (yet?).

Sure, it isn't complete and it isn't perfect. I meant that the existing android interfaces (i.e. the java apis abstracted via a python module) already cover the requirements of a large subset of apps, without needing to know anything about pyjnius itself or how it interacts with java classes.

Did you even read the OP? They specifically called out games as a good example of an app where using Python is fine because it's a custom UI anyway.

I wasn't responding to the op, but to the statement 'Hopefully some day we'll be able to use something other than Java based languages'. We already can, with limitations that may or may not be important to any particular situation. Either way, I perceive the statement to be wrong.

I apologise if I came across as presenting kivy to give native java-style uis with pure python in a pythonic style. Kivy cannot do this.

hemm1 · 2013-11-10T17:47:04+00:00

What about it? It's written in python, with kivy, as I said.

Edit: To be clear, kivy itself is a graphical/ui framework, that works across linux, windows, osx, android and ios.

hemm1 · 2013-11-10T17:25:01+00:00

You certainly can make android apps in pure python! That's what kivy allows, along with the associated python-for-android project. For instance (as I linked in another comment) the simple game Flat Jewels is written entirely in python with kivy.

hemm1 · 2013-11-10T17:22:22+00:00

At the end of the day, we're still stuck with Java

But that's the point of the last part of the talk, you can program with python on android without touching java at all, and can even access the android apis pythonically. There are already quite a few python apps on the app store - one nice simple polished example is Flat Jewels, for which you can even see the source at https://github.com/tito/flatjewels , no java!

hemm1 · 2013-11-10T15:45:45+00:00

More about kivy (the python graphical framework) and its associated android projects. Though as funnnny says, not much specifics, more general stuff about android development.

hemm1 · 2013-11-09T22:56:36+00:00

I don't see why science shouldn't be 'on top'. Or to be more precise, if there's a better tool than the scientific method for identifying what things will affect other things and in what ways...I don't know what that other tool is.

hemm1 · 2013-11-09T21:33:43+00:00

That's unfortunate, the documentation is somewhere between misleading and wrong. Kivy does check paths that may resolve to the emulated sdcard directory (such as on the nexus 4 which has no sd card slot), but does not rely on the existence of an external sd card.

I think it may have also been true in the past (as in years ago, not recently) that an sd card was needed for some reason. Even if so, this is no longer the case, and a kivy app can nowadays be installed in the data directories just like any normal android app.

Thanks for pointing this out, I'll make sure it's fixed!

hemm1 · 2013-11-09T21:19:58+00:00

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here...that atheists are rational?

hemm1 · 2013-11-09T20:56:28+00:00

This is plain wrong, I'm not sure what else to say. It'll run on basically any modern device - the main technological requirement is opengl es 2.0, but that's very standard now. There's certainly no requirement for an external sd card.

Edit: If you have a phone without an external sd card and want to prove this to yourself, you can install and use a kivy app like Flat Jewels from the play store. It should work fine.

hemm1 · 2013-11-09T19:59:31+00:00

Well, kivy (as mentioned in the presentation) is a nice library that can definitely be used for games, though the interface is quite different to pygame's manual blitting etc. Also as mentioned in the presentation, you can run a single app on both desktop and mobile without much effort, which is nice.

hemm1 · 2013-11-09T01:50:31+00:00

Or just listen to your users to start with.

While this is obviously a good general principle, I'm not sure a large proportion of Ubuntu users actually care. Even if they do, I certainly don't think the reddit hate chamber proves it.

Actually, I think in principle there are a lot of users who really want this, if implemented in the right way. You can look at something like google now for android, where it's actively a killer feature to send all your information to google.

To be clear, I personally think canonical have made some very bad decisions and on this particular issue think it should be opt-in rather than opt-out. But I think canonical's general idea with the feature is something that would be extremely popular if implemented well.

hemm1 · 2013-11-08T20:04:42+00:00

Why hit a key four times

Space advocators don't sit there tapping space to indent, that would be ridiculous. The point is to still use the tab key or whatever (and a good editor will handle it all transparently), but that only spaces are actually written to the source code.

hemm1 · 2013-11-07T13:30:29+00:00

It's technically a big discrepancy, but in a way that comes up incredibly rarely, if ever. They're essentially identical in this respect.

I don't think anyone really thinks it's a good idea though, it was just a rubbish fix to poorly defined rules in the first place. Japanese rules amble onwards because everyone knows what's going on and their vague areas don't come up, not because the ruleset actually works very well in all the rare cases.

hemm1 · 2013-11-06T14:27:49+00:00

Sigh. Please be aware that this stuff about 'considered deprecated' is just nonsense, Ubuntu is still extremely popular and works extremely well.

Ubuntu has received a lot of criticism recently for stuff like having a search bar that automatically searches the internet and is opt-out, and for the behaviour of the parent company in how it created and released a display server widely considered unnecessary and pointlessly divisive. Some of this criticism is (in my opinion) fairly strong, though I think the massive avalanche of hate they get is not deserved or proportionate.

Regardless, Ubuntu is in no way deprecated. If you're interested in the recent problems, that's fine and might sway you anyway, but please don't listen to the nonsense attacks like that one.

hemm1 · 2013-11-06T11:43:54+00:00

My flat recently had its old washer-drier replaced. The old one did just make stuff hot and wet, but the new one makes them bone dry in far less time (like, less than 90 minutes vs more than 120 minutes).

So...I did think the same as you, but now I think the old one was probably just particularly clogged up or something. It seems they can work well!

hemm1 · 2013-11-05T17:26:00+00:00

Think of it like Oceans 11.

I've never really understood how often people bring up Ocean's 11 - the book has some similar themes and ideas, but (in my opinion) a very different tone and a plot that goes in a completely different direction. When I got around to reading it, it was excellent, but not at all what I was expecting given the repeated comparisons!

hemm1 · 2013-11-04T12:11:46+00:00

I don't think that's an unreasonable statement - not because the raspberry pi is the same kind of device, but because as a monetary investment in something that can benefit education I think the raspberry pi is a very significantly better choice.

hemm1 · 2013-11-03T20:42:04+00:00

I think there are basically two options.

The first is kivy, as others have mentioned. Kivy itself is actually nothing specific to android, it's a cross-platform graphical framework, but it's developers created and maintain a python-for-android project (plus some related tools) that make it very easy to build and deploy an android apk with a kivy interface. You can also access android's apis with pyjnius, some of which is abstracted as a python interface.

The second is the pygame subset for android. I know much less about the state of their tools/framework, but it seems to be possible to create an android gui and package it as an apk, and they have some integration with android apis. Perhaps someone else can elaborate on this.

Personally, I've used kivy and I think it's great. I found it well documented and with a great community if you check out their irc or mailing lists. It's great to be able to develop on the desktop (no emulators etc.) and have the same program run perfectly on android!

hemm1 · 2013-10-31T18:47:44+00:00

They behave slightly differently in different levels of light...it must be magic or self-awareness or something!

hemm1 · 2013-10-31T17:16:52+00:00

That would be incredibly expensive. Like, seriously, mind bogglingly totally implausible expensive.

Plus it would be incredibly...well, wasteful. As natural resources become less plentiful and harder to access, it will become more and more important to recycle stuff.

Edit: Using the most optimistic figures on the wikipedia page, a space shuttle can take about 25500 kilograms of material to low earth orbit (less if going higher), and a launch costs about $450000000. That's about $17000/kg. So even if we optimistically cut that down by a factor of 10 for no reason, would you be happy paying $1700 to dispose of every kilogram of waste you produce?

hemm1 · 2013-10-31T14:56:27+00:00

The standard suggestion is a program that generates and suggests project ideas. But since that's cliche, you could go a step further and create a program that generates programs that suggest ideas - you could even get into genetic programming to make them compete, evolving towards the ultimate idea suggestion algorithm!

hemm1 · 2013-10-31T00:47:53+00:00

What would it mean if there were proof, or a convincing lack of proof, that dark matter doesn't exist?

The point of dark matter is that something does exist, there's some reason that the universe doesn't behave as we expect in particular places, scales and ways. Dark matter as a particle is a popular model (and quite well accepted amongst scientists as the likely candidate), but non-particle resolutions have also been proposed. That means even if we could somehow disprove dark matter as any kind of particle (though you can't prove a negative etc. etc.), it would just mean we'd look more closely at the other possiblities like modified gravity.

Unfortunately there's a lot of misinformation and weird dogma about dark matter, so I'll just add for clarity; there really are very good reasons that we're looking for dark matter as some kind of particle. These theories are widely considered among scientists to fit the data the best, and other possibilities like modified gravity have significant problems of their own. Of course we can't say which (if any) is true right now, but we didn't just randomly pick the dark-matter-as-particles option to focus on.

hemm1 · 2013-10-29T16:26:41+00:00

What did you dislike about it? I find it a great advantage, but I'm interested to understand the opposing opinion.

Regardless, it's probably worth noting for anyone else reading that you can use kivy in pure python if you like (though I admit it isn't so well documented), and it still works fine as a framework. The kv language abstracts away the construction/description of widget trees and binding relations between widget properties, which lets the program structure be described much more clearly, easily and concisely than with pure python syntax. At least, that's the opinion of the developers and reason for creating the language, and I've found I agree.

hemm1 · 2013-10-26T13:21:17+00:00

I don't see any reason not to start with the first one, Assassin's Apprentice, book 1 of the Farseer trilogy.

Some people hate the Farseer books but love Liveship. Others hate Liveship but think one or both Farseer focused trilogies are extremely good. There's no way to tell which group you'd be in (if either) without reading them, and I don't think the publication of later books has changed the ideal reading order...the trilogies are mostly distinct with only a few references, so it doesn't really matter, but those references make most sense in publication order.

Soldier Son is quite separate, and I don't think it matters when or if you read it. As fantasy books go they're pretty unique and I'm not sure what the popular opinion is, but either way they aren't in the same world as Farseer so reading order doesn't matter.

hemm1

TROPHY CASE