Month: March 2013

I was lucky enough to give a talk about Kivy – a multi-touch, cross-platform Python GUI and application framework – at GRDevDay 2013. Although my talk was the least-attended talk I went to all day, I enjoyed giving it and I got to meet a few new Python folks from Michigan. I’m going to chalk up the attendance to the fact that I was in the same time slot as a lot of good talks, including three that I wanted to see myself. Ah well, such are conferences. At any rate, it gave me an opportunity to see what worked and what didn’t in this talk so I can make some changes before I give it at MobiDevDay Detroit in May.

GRDevDay was a great conference. The organizers really treat the speakers well with a semi-private speaker’s lounge and even special gifts. This is one of the few local events that I attend where I don’t do any organizing, and even though I feel like kind of a slacker, it also feels good to not have all of that pressure for the whole day. The GitHub-hosted drink-up at Kitchen76 was unbelievably crowded, but I still had fun and got to talk at length with some people I usually chat with infrequently online.

For those interested, I’ve posted the slides from my Kivy talk to Speaker Deck, and you can find the tutorial as it existed for the talk in this repository on GitHub.

[Edit 2013-03-05]
There were a few questions I was unable to answer at my GRdevDay talk. As I find answers, I will post them here.

Question: Can you make Android widgets using Kivy?
Answer: Probably not, but there has been a lot of work in pyjnius. No one has tried it recently.

[Edit 2013-03-07]
In my talk I said that you have to specify Android permissions in the Manifest.xml file. This is incorrect, you specify the permissions as part of the build command. See the Python for Android docs for more information.