Prepare for the Kivy contest #2

Developers, developers… rejoice!

kivy contest

The kivy project is organizing a second contest!

From the 15th of April, when the theme will be revealed, to the 15th of May, the final deadline, all the interested candidates will compete to produce the nicest application possible, once month to make the difference, and collect prices :).

Prizes will be announced before the beginning of the contest, the python software foundation kindly offered to sponsor the contest, if you are or know somebody interested in sponsoring the contest, please contact us at contest@kivy.org.

Prepare for the Kivy contest #2

Developers, developers… rejoice!

kivy contest

The kivy project is organizing a second contest!

From the 15th of April, when the theme will be revealed, to the 15th of May, the final deadline, all the interested candidates will compete to produce the nicest application possible, once month to make the difference, and collect prices :).

Prizes will be announced before the beginning of the contest, the python software foundation kindly offered to sponsor the contest, if you are or know somebody interested in sponsoring the contest, please contact us at contest@kivy.org.

Kpritz

Just because it seemed not to hard, i spent the evening (actually about 2 hours) making a Spritz clone using kivy.

Code is a bit crude and all, but here it is for your enjoyment:

https://gist.github.com/9316552

Here is an apk if you want to actually try it.

Only flat text files are supported, opening the option window is a bit slow (because of ColorPickers), but it’s functionnal, progression is saved, all the options i though were needed are there, and it seems usable.

You can find a lot of free book in the .txt format over at project gutenberg.

Kpritz

Just because it seemed not to hard, i spent the evening (actually about 2 hours) making a Spritz clone using kivy.

Code is a bit crude and all, but here it is for your enjoyment:

https://gist.github.com/9316552

Here is an apk if you want to actually try it.

Only flat text files are supported, opening the option window is a bit slow (because of ColorPickers), but it’s functionnal, progression is saved, all the options i though were needed are there, and it seems usable.

You can find a lot of free book in the .txt format over at project gutenberg.

Using tex_coords in kivy for fun and profit

Your gpu is an awesome thing, it can do all kind of calculations, very fast. For example, instead of telling it exactly how you want each pixels to be, you can throw textures and vertices at it, and have it correctly deduce how this things will have to look.

To do this, though, you must tell it what part of the texture will be stuck to each vertice. This is usually denoted using texture coordinates.

Texture coordinates, like usual coordinates, indicate the place of something. Instead of noting them x and y, they are often called u and v, which allows to clearly note what parts of an equation relate to each.

While kivy offers you high level canvas instructions, it gives you a pretty good access to lower level features, and you can actually manipulate the texture coordinates of your Rectangle instructions. This allow for cheap zooming, repeat-scrolling, and other image manipulations, since your gpu is doing all the actual work.

tex_coords = u, v, u + w, v, u + w, v + h, u, v + h

which is better understood as:

tex_coords = [
    u,     v,
    u + w, v,
    u + w, v + h,
    u,     v + h
]

considering a default tex_coords value, where u and v = 0, and w and h = 1 (all values are relatives, so usually between 0 and 1).

u, v + h-------u + w, v + h
|              |
u, v-----------u + w, v

which means the 4 angles of your texture, will be on the 4 angles of your rectangle, how dull!

One way to play with different values, is to create a little app showing you the effect of deformations.

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.lang import Builder
from kivy.uix.widget import Widget
from kivy.properties import ObjectProperty, ListProperty
from kivy.core.image import Image as CoreImage

kv = '''
#:import chain itertools.chain
RootWidget:
    canvas:
        Color:
            rgba: 1, 1, 1, 1
        Rectangle:
            pos: root.pos
            size: root.size
            texture: app.texture
            # here is our usage of the calculated texture coordinates
            # we devide by 100 because we took the input with a 100x100
            # rectangle as default value
            tex_coords: [x / 100. for x in chain(*root.points)]

        PushMatrix
        # translate the rectangle to make it easier to play with
        Translate:
            xy: root.width / 2, root.height / 2

        Color:
            rgba: 1, 0, 0, .5
        Line:
            points: chain(*root.points + root.points[:1])
            width: 2
        PopMatrix
'''


def dist(point, pos):
    return ((point[0] - pos[0]) ** 2 + (point[1] - pos[1]) ** 2)
    # ** .5 # who cares about square root here? it doesn't change the order


class RootWidget(Widget):
    # the default values, a 100x100 square, displayed around the middle of the screen
    points = ListProperty([[0, 0], [100, 0], [100, 100], [0, 100]])

    def on_touch_down(self, touch, *args):
        # compensate the translation done in canvas
        pos = touch.pos[0] - self.width / 2, touch.pos[1] - self.height / 2

        touch.ud['point'] = min(
            range(4), key=lambda x: dist(self.points[x], pos))

    def on_touch_move(self, touch, *args):
        # compensate the translation done in canvas
        pos = touch.pos[0] - self.width / 2, touch.pos[1] - self.height / 2
        # update the point
        self.points[touch.ud['point']] = pos


class TexCoordsApp(App):
    texture = ObjectProperty(None)

    def build(self):
        self.root = Builder.load_string(kv)
        self.texture = CoreImage.load(
            'GrassGreenTexture0002.jpg').texture
        self.texture.wrap = 'repeat'
        return self.root


if __name__ == '__main__':
    TexCoordsApp().run()

The texture have been scrapped on the web and is not very interesting, but you can find it here.

Of course, this is much more a learning device (helful because these transformation are not quite straighforward for our brains) than a practical application, but a lot more can be done.

Here is, for example, a little infinite scroll app uting this concept.

edit: Ben Rousch kindly created apks out of the two examples, if you want to try them on android: TexCoordsExample ScrollExample

Using tex_coords in kivy for fun and profit

Your gpu is an awesome thing, it can do all kind of calculations, very fast. For example, instead of telling it exactly how you want each pixels to be, you can throw textures and vertices at it, and have it correctly deduce how this things will have to look.

To do this, though, you must tell it what part of the texture will be stuck to each vertice. This is usually denoted using texture coordinates.

Texture coordinates, like usual coordinates, indicate the place of something. Instead of noting them x and y, they are often called u and v, which allows to clearly note what parts of an equation relate to each.

While kivy offers you high level canvas instructions, it gives you a pretty good access to lower level features, and you can actually manipulate the texture coordinates of your Rectangle instructions. This allow for cheap zooming, repeat-scrolling, and other image manipulations, since your gpu is doing all the actual work.

tex_coords = u, v, u + w, v, u + w, v + h, u, v + h

which is better understood as:

tex_coords = [
    u,     v,
    u + w, v,
    u + w, v + h,
    u,     v + h
]

considering a default tex_coords value, where u and v = 0, and w and h = 1 (all values are relatives, so usually between 0 and 1).

u, v + h-------u + w, v + h
|              |
u, v-----------u + w, v

which means the 4 angles of your texture, will be on the 4 angles of your rectangle, how dull!

One way to play with different values, is to create a little app showing you the effect of deformations.

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.lang import Builder
from kivy.uix.widget import Widget
from kivy.properties import ObjectProperty, ListProperty
from kivy.core.image import Image as CoreImage

kv = '''
#:import chain itertools.chain
RootWidget:
    canvas:
        Color:
            rgba: 1, 1, 1, 1
        Rectangle:
            pos: root.pos
            size: root.size
            texture: app.texture
            # here is our usage of the calculated texture coordinates
            # we devide by 100 because we took the input with a 100x100
            # rectangle as default value
            tex_coords: [x / 100. for x in chain(*root.points)]

        PushMatrix
        # translate the rectangle to make it easier to play with
        Translate:
            xy: root.width / 2, root.height / 2

        Color:
            rgba: 1, 0, 0, .5
        Line:
            points: chain(*root.points + root.points[:1])
            width: 2
        PopMatrix
'''


def dist(point, pos):
    return ((point[0] - pos[0]) ** 2 + (point[1] - pos[1]) ** 2)
    # ** .5 # who cares about square root here? it doesn't change the order


class RootWidget(Widget):
    # the default values, a 100x100 square, displayed around the middle of the screen
    points = ListProperty([[0, 0], [100, 0], [100, 100], [0, 100]])

    def on_touch_down(self, touch, *args):
        # compensate the translation done in canvas
        pos = touch.pos[0] - self.width / 2, touch.pos[1] - self.height / 2

        touch.ud['point'] = min(
            range(4), key=lambda x: dist(self.points[x], pos))

    def on_touch_move(self, touch, *args):
        # compensate the translation done in canvas
        pos = touch.pos[0] - self.width / 2, touch.pos[1] - self.height / 2
        # update the point
        self.points[touch.ud['point']] = pos


class TexCoordsApp(App):
    texture = ObjectProperty(None)

    def build(self):
        self.root = Builder.load_string(kv)
        self.texture = CoreImage.load(
            'GrassGreenTexture0002.jpg').texture
        self.texture.wrap = 'repeat'
        return self.root


if __name__ == '__main__':
    TexCoordsApp().run()

The texture have been scrapped on the web and is not very interesting, but you can find it here.

Of course, this is much more a learning device (helful because these transformation are not quite straighforward for our brains) than a practical application, but a lot more can be done.

Here is, for example, a little infinite scroll app uting this concept.

edit: Ben Rousch kindly created apks out of the two examples, if you want to try them on android: TexCoordsExample ScrollExample

Magnet: a widget to easily make your interface more lively

Kivy has a very nice Animation class, that allows you to move move widgets around (or other things), by updating any numeric property to a target value, just by setting a time and a transition function. Still, when you are building a complex interface, it can still be a bit cumbersome to manually trigger animations for all the elements, and to keep track of them.

After being frustrated about this issue for some time, i tried my luck some time ago, at doing a nicer, “90% use cases” interface, and the Magnet garden widget was born.

Its usage is simple, you simply use it to wrap your target widget, and give it rules about how to transition when the magnet is moved. As the magnet is moved or resized by the usual kivy logic, instead of making the wrapped widget immediately follow such constraints, it’ll create and keep track of animations to achieve a smooth transition to the new values for you.

As any garden “flower”, to install it, you need to install and use the garden project.

python setup.py install

(either in a virtualenv or system-wide)

then do:

garden install magnet

you can now import it a kivy application:

from kivy.garden.magnet import Magnet

Garden Magnet video

Magnet: a widget to easily make your interface more lively

Kivy has a very nice Animation class, that allows you to move move widgets around (or other things), by updating any numeric property to a target value, just by setting a time and a transition function. Still, when you are building a complex interface, it can still be a bit cumbersome to manually trigger animations for all the elements, and to keep track of them.

After being frustrated about this issue for some time, i tried my luck some time ago, at doing a nicer, “90% use cases” interface, and the Magnet garden widget was born.

Its usage is simple, you simply use it to wrap your target widget, and give it rules about how to transition when the magnet is moved. As the magnet is moved or resized by the usual kivy logic, instead of making the wrapped widget immediately follow such constraints, it’ll create and keep track of animations to achieve a smooth transition to the new values for you.

As any garden “flower”, to install it, you need to install and use the garden project.

python setup.py install

(either in a virtualenv or system-wide)

then do:

garden install magnet

you can now import it a kivy application:

from kivy.garden.magnet import Magnet

Garden Magnet video

Kivy image manipulations with Mesh and Textures

If you want to give a little life to interactive (or not) elements, it’s always nice to have more tricks to manipulate images for nifty effects.

One of such ways is mapping a Texture on a special canvas instruction, that will distort your texture based on the position of its points.

[kivy.graphics.Mesh](http://kivy.org/docs/api-kivy.graphics.html#kivy.graphics.Mesh) is such an instruction, and it has a simple interface, if not 100% straightforward, you basically call it this way.

Mesh:
vertices: (x1, y1, s1, v1, x2, y2, s2, v2, x3, y3, s3, v3...)
indices: (1, 2, 3...)
texture: some_texture
mode: some_mode

where all: x mean the horizontal coordinate of a point y mean the vertical coordinate of a point s mean the horizontal position of the texture attached to this point (between 0 and 1) v mean the vertical position of the texture attached to this point (between 0 and 1)

indices is useful if, for some (very good) reason, you don’t want to give the points in the order you’ll use them, or if you want to refer to a point multiple time (this won’t be demonstrated in this blog post, but try to think about a grid mapping, for example), now we will use it in the most simple way, just give the range of your number of points.

the texture needs to be a texture object, you can get such an object by getting the texture property of a [CoreImage](http://kivy.org/docs/api-kivy.core.image.html#kivy.core.image.Image) or an Image (or even a Label, if you want to).

Let’s say we have an image, for example, kivy logo.

from kivy.core.image import Image as CoreImage

texture = CoreImage('data/logo/kivy-icon-512.png').texture

(this will work wherever you are, because kivy look at his images anyway :))

This image is a circle, lets use that to cut it into a virtual pie and assign a part of the texture to each part, we’ll be using the triangle_fan mode of Mesh, that is a perfect fit for such an operation.

# the central point
points = [Window.width / 2, Window.height / 2, .5, .5]

# now go around
    i = 0
    while i < 2 * pi:
        i += 0.01 * pi
        points.extend([
    Window.width / 2 + cos(i) * 100,
    Window.height / 2 + sin(i) * 100,
    .5 + sin(i),
    .5 + cos(i)])

put that in a more complete program, and you get this:

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.lang import Builder
from kivy.core.image import Image as CoreImage
from kivy.properties import ListProperty, ObjectProperty
from kivy.clock import Clock
from kivy.core.window import Window
from math import sin, cos, pi


kv = '''
Widget:
    canvas:
        Color:
            rgba: 1, 1, 1, 1
        Mesh:
            vertices: app.mesh_points
            indices: range(len(app.mesh_points) / 4)
            texture: app.mesh_texture
            mode: 'triangle_fan'
'''


class MeshBallApp(App):
    mesh_points = ListProperty([])
    mesh_texture = ObjectProperty(None)

    def build(self):
        self.mesh_texture = CoreImage('data/logo/kivy-icon-512.png').texture
        Clock.schedule_interval(self.update_points, 0)
        return Builder.load_string(kv)

    def update_points(self, *args):
        points = [Window.width / 2, Window.height / 2, .5, .5]
        i = 0
        while i < 2 * pi:
            i += 0.01 * pi
            points.extend([
                Window.width / 2 + cos(i) * 100,
                Window.height / 2 + sin(i) * 100,
                .5 + cos(i),
                .5 + sin(i)])

        self.mesh_points = points

if __name__ == '__main__':
    MeshBallApp().run()

Now, this is not very impressive, we just have an image, there were much simpler ways to do that!

But now, we can tweek the rendering a lot, lets add some offseting of the texture, some radius change, and some wobbling, with sliders to control all this.

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.lang import Builder
from kivy.core.image import Image as CoreImage
from kivy.properties import ListProperty, ObjectProperty, NumericProperty
from kivy.clock import Clock
from kivy.core.window import Window
from math import sin, cos, pi


kv = '''
BoxLayout:
    Widget:
        canvas:
            Color:
                rgba: 1, 1, 1, 1
            Mesh:
                vertices: app.mesh_points
                indices: range(len(app.mesh_points) / 4)
                texture: app.mesh_texture
                mode: 'triangle_fan'
    BoxLayout:
        orientation: 'vertical'
        size_hint_x: None
        width: 100
        Slider:
            value: app.offset_x
            on_value: app.offset_x = args[1]
            min: -1
            max: 1
        Slider:
            value: app.offset_y
            on_value: app.offset_y = args[1]
            min: -1
            max: 1
        Slider:
            value: app.radius
            on_value: app.radius = args[1]
            min: 10
            max: 1000
        Slider:
            value: app.sin_wobble
            on_value: app.sin_wobble = args[1]
            min: -50
            max: 50
        Slider:
            value: app.sin_wobble_speed
            on_value: app.sin_wobble_speed = args[1]
            min: 0
            max: 50
            step: 1
'''


class MeshBallApp(App):
    mesh_points = ListProperty([])
    mesh_texture = ObjectProperty(None)
    radius = NumericProperty(500)
    offset_x = NumericProperty(.5)
    offset_y = NumericProperty(.5)
    sin_wobble = NumericProperty(0)
    sin_wobble_speed = NumericProperty(0)

    def build(self):
        self.mesh_texture = CoreImage('data/logo/kivy-icon-512.png').texture
        Clock.schedule_interval(self.update_points, 0)
        return Builder.load_string(kv)

    def update_points(self, *args):
        points = [Window.width / 2, Window.height / 2, .5, .5]
        i = 0
        while i < 2 * pi:
            i += 0.01 * pi
            points.extend([
                Window.width / 2 + cos(i) * (self.radius + self.sin_wobble * sin(i * self.sin_wobble_speed)),
                Window.height / 2 + sin(i) * (self.radius + self.sin_wobble * sin(i * self.sin_wobble_speed)),
                self.offset_x + sin(i),
                self.offset_y + cos(i)])

        self.mesh_points = points

if __name__ == '__main__':
    MeshBallApp().run()

which gives us:

Kivy image manipulations with Mesh and Text

Now we are talking!

Kivy image manipulations with Mesh and Textures

If you want to give a little life to interactive (or not) elements, it’s always nice to have more tricks to manipulate images for nifty effects.

One of such ways is mapping a Texture on a special canvas instruction, that will distort your texture based on the position of its points.

[kivy.graphics.Mesh](http://kivy.org/docs/api-kivy.graphics.html#kivy.graphics.Mesh) is such an instruction, and it has a simple interface, if not 100% straightforward, you basically call it this way.

Mesh:
vertices: (x1, y1, s1, v1, x2, y2, s2, v2, x3, y3, s3, v3...)
indices: (1, 2, 3...)
texture: some_texture
mode: some_mode

where all: x mean the horizontal coordinate of a point y mean the vertical coordinate of a point s mean the horizontal position of the texture attached to this point (between 0 and 1) v mean the vertical position of the texture attached to this point (between 0 and 1)

indices is useful if, for some (very good) reason, you don’t want to give the points in the order you’ll use them, or if you want to refer to a point multiple time (this won’t be demonstrated in this blog post, but try to think about a grid mapping, for example), now we will use it in the most simple way, just give the range of your number of points.

the texture needs to be a texture object, you can get such an object by getting the texture property of a [CoreImage](http://kivy.org/docs/api-kivy.core.image.html#kivy.core.image.Image) or an Image (or even a Label, if you want to).

Let’s say we have an image, for example, kivy logo.

from kivy.core.image import Image as CoreImage

texture = CoreImage('data/logo/kivy-icon-512.png').texture

(this will work wherever you are, because kivy look at his images anyway :))

This image is a circle, lets use that to cut it into a virtual pie and assign a part of the texture to each part, we’ll be using the triangle_fan mode of Mesh, that is a perfect fit for such an operation.

# the central point
points = [Window.width / 2, Window.height / 2, .5, .5]

# now go around
    i = 0
    while i < 2 * pi:
        i += 0.01 * pi
        points.extend([
    Window.width / 2 + cos(i) * 100,
    Window.height / 2 + sin(i) * 100,
    .5 + sin(i),
    .5 + cos(i)])

put that in a more complete program, and you get this:

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.lang import Builder
from kivy.core.image import Image as CoreImage
from kivy.properties import ListProperty, ObjectProperty
from kivy.clock import Clock
from kivy.core.window import Window
from math import sin, cos, pi


kv = '''
Widget:
    canvas:
        Color:
            rgba: 1, 1, 1, 1
        Mesh:
            vertices: app.mesh_points
            indices: range(len(app.mesh_points) / 4)
            texture: app.mesh_texture
            mode: 'triangle_fan'
'''


class MeshBallApp(App):
    mesh_points = ListProperty([])
    mesh_texture = ObjectProperty(None)

    def build(self):
        self.mesh_texture = CoreImage('data/logo/kivy-icon-512.png').texture
        Clock.schedule_interval(self.update_points, 0)
        return Builder.load_string(kv)

    def update_points(self, *args):
        points = [Window.width / 2, Window.height / 2, .5, .5]
        i = 0
        while i < 2 * pi:
            i += 0.01 * pi
            points.extend([
                Window.width / 2 + cos(i) * 100,
                Window.height / 2 + sin(i) * 100,
                .5 + cos(i),
                .5 + sin(i)])

        self.mesh_points = points

if __name__ == '__main__':
    MeshBallApp().run()

Now, this is not very impressive, we just have an image, there were much simpler ways to do that!

But now, we can tweek the rendering a lot, lets add some offseting of the texture, some radius change, and some wobbling, with sliders to control all this.

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.lang import Builder
from kivy.core.image import Image as CoreImage
from kivy.properties import ListProperty, ObjectProperty, NumericProperty
from kivy.clock import Clock
from kivy.core.window import Window
from math import sin, cos, pi


kv = '''
BoxLayout:
    Widget:
        canvas:
            Color:
                rgba: 1, 1, 1, 1
            Mesh:
                vertices: app.mesh_points
                indices: range(len(app.mesh_points) / 4)
                texture: app.mesh_texture
                mode: 'triangle_fan'
    BoxLayout:
        orientation: 'vertical'
        size_hint_x: None
        width: 100
        Slider:
            value: app.offset_x
            on_value: app.offset_x = args[1]
            min: -1
            max: 1
        Slider:
            value: app.offset_y
            on_value: app.offset_y = args[1]
            min: -1
            max: 1
        Slider:
            value: app.radius
            on_value: app.radius = args[1]
            min: 10
            max: 1000
        Slider:
            value: app.sin_wobble
            on_value: app.sin_wobble = args[1]
            min: -50
            max: 50
        Slider:
            value: app.sin_wobble_speed
            on_value: app.sin_wobble_speed = args[1]
            min: 0
            max: 50
            step: 1
'''


class MeshBallApp(App):
    mesh_points = ListProperty([])
    mesh_texture = ObjectProperty(None)
    radius = NumericProperty(500)
    offset_x = NumericProperty(.5)
    offset_y = NumericProperty(.5)
    sin_wobble = NumericProperty(0)
    sin_wobble_speed = NumericProperty(0)

    def build(self):
        self.mesh_texture = CoreImage('data/logo/kivy-icon-512.png').texture
        Clock.schedule_interval(self.update_points, 0)
        return Builder.load_string(kv)

    def update_points(self, *args):
        points = [Window.width / 2, Window.height / 2, .5, .5]
        i = 0
        while i < 2 * pi:
            i += 0.01 * pi
            points.extend([
                Window.width / 2 + cos(i) * (self.radius + self.sin_wobble * sin(i * self.sin_wobble_speed)),
                Window.height / 2 + sin(i) * (self.radius + self.sin_wobble * sin(i * self.sin_wobble_speed)),
                self.offset_x + sin(i),
                self.offset_y + cos(i)])

        self.mesh_points = points

if __name__ == '__main__':
    MeshBallApp().run()

which gives us:

Kivy image manipulations with Mesh and Text

Now we are talking!