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IOS Support for Kivy

Kivy has now added official support for IOS platform. You can now package your Kivy application for the Ipad (and other iOS devices, testers needed).

The current instructions are available here: http://kivy.org/docs/guide/packaging-ios.html

For the full story on the multiple Apple limitations we are working with, i want to share the hardest part for Python integration: Apple’s prohibition on using dlopen() to load dynamic libraries.
In a typical case, a compiled Python library’s extension is a “.so”, and the “.so” is dlopen() at import.

That being said, as we did for the python-for-android project published in January, we are redirecting the compilation object to create static libraries. Theses libraries are included in the final application binary. But it’s not enough: we must also tell to Python to look for the library entry point in the application binary, instead of dlopen(). So in the python dynload loader:

return (dl_funcptr) dlsym(RTLD_MAIN_ONLY, funcname)

This way, Python will always look at the application binary, and never need to use dlopen().

If you are worried that Apple would reject a Python-based application, or even using Kivy altogether, we have tested it for you: the game that won the Kivy contest has been packaged for IOS, submitted to Apple… and accepted. You can found Deflectouch on iTunes (source code).

Anyway, Kivy is now officially supporting 5 platforms: Windows, Linux, MacOSX, Android and IOS!

Enjoy 🙂

Posted on

IOS Support for Kivy

Kivy has now added official support for IOS platform. You can now package your Kivy application for the Ipad (and other iOS devices, testers needed).

The current instructions are available here: http://kivy.org/docs/guide/packaging-ios.html

For the full story on the multiple Apple limitations we are working with, i want to share the hardest part for Python integration: Apple’s prohibition on using dlopen() to load dynamic libraries.
In a typical case, a compiled Python library’s extension is a “.so”, and the “.so” is dlopen() at import.

That being said, as we did for the python-for-android project published in January, we are redirecting the compilation object to create static libraries. Theses libraries are included in the final application binary. But it’s not enough: we must also tell to Python to look for the library entry point in the application binary, instead of dlopen(). So in the python dynload loader:

return (dl_funcptr) dlsym(RTLD_MAIN_ONLY, funcname)

This way, Python will always look at the application binary, and never need to use dlopen().

If you are worried that Apple would reject a Python-based application, or even using Kivy altogether, we have tested it for you: the game that won the Kivy contest has been packaged for IOS, submitted to Apple… and accepted. You can found Deflectouch on iTunes (source code).

Anyway, Kivy is now officially supporting 5 platforms: Windows, Linux, MacOSX, Android and IOS!

Enjoy :)

Posted on

Kivy programming contest #1 is over!

During January, we hosted a contest for promoting the Kivy framework. The goal was simple: create a game using Kivy, without external non-pure python dependencies. All the entries have been submitted on our sponsor Github (and thanks to NotionInk), under a compatible OSS licence. The contest registered 21 entries, and 11 submissions was valid.

Our winners are:

  1. Deflectouch, from Cyril Stoller
  2. FishLife, from Zogg
  3. memoryKivy, from Niavlys
  4. Centripetal, from Dilon Cower
  5. Flingy, from Andy Wilson

In term of numbers, everything is growing:

  • 19919 unique visitors for the website (vs 9772 in December)
  • +56 subscribers on the mailing list (192 in total)
  • 229 messages on kivy-users (vs 94 in December)
  • 23 pull requests (vs 6 in December)

That was a great event so far, with a perfect timing: Kivy have now 1 year old! (first release was 1st February 2011).

Posted on

Kivy programming contest #1 is over!

During January, we hosted a contest for promoting the Kivy framework. The goal was simple: create a game using Kivy, without external non-pure python dependencies. All the entries have been submitted on our sponsor Github (and thanks to NotionInk), under a compatible OSS licence. The contest registered 21 entries, and 11 submissions was valid.

Our winners are:

  1. Deflectouch, from Cyril Stoller
  2. FishLife, from Zogg
  3. memoryKivy, from Niavlys
  4. Centripetal, from Dilon Cower
  5. Flingy, from Andy Wilson

In term of numbers, everything is growing:

  • 19919 unique visitors for the website (vs 9772 in December)
  • +56 subscribers on the mailing list (192 in total)
  • 229 messages on kivy-users (vs 94 in December)
  • 23 pull requests (vs 6 in December)

That was a great event so far, with a perfect timing: Kivy have now 1 year old! (first release was 1st February 2011).

Posted on

Introducing “Python for Android”

I’m glad to share a new project called Python for Android. The goal of this project is to package your python application into an APK.

https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android

The project is under the umbrella of Kivy organization, but is not designed to be limited to Kivy only. Read the documentation to correctly install the NDK/SDK Android, and set the needed environment variables.

The packaging is done in 4 steps:
1. Ensure you have Android SDK/NDK downloaded and correctly installed
2. Ensure you have some environment set
3. Create a Python distribution containing the selected modules
4. Use that distribution to build an APK of your Python application

Creating the python distribution is as simple as that:

# create a simple distribution with python + PIL + Kivy
./distribute.sh -m "pil kivy"

# create a distribution with python + openssl + pil + kivy
./distribute.sh -m "openssl pil kivy"

A directory dist/default will be created, including the result of the whole arm compilation.
Available libraries as for today: jpeg pil png sdl sqlite3 pygame kivy android libxml2 libxslt lxml ffmpeg openssl.

The second step is a little bit harder, since you need to provide more information for Android:

cd dist/default
./build.py --package org.test.touchtracer --name touchtracer \
--version 1.0 --dir ~/code/kivy/examples/demo/touchtracer debug installd

# --package: java name of your application
# --name: title of your application
# --version: version of your application
# --dir: location of your application containing the main.py

Then you’ll get a nicely bin/touchtracer-1.0-debug.apk

Pro:

  • A blacklist.txt file that can be used to exclude files in the final APK
  • Reusable distribution for other applications
  • Modular recipes architecture
  • Be able to build independents python distributions

Cons:

  • You need a main.py file that will be used for starting your application
  • Only one java bootstrap available, using OpenGL ES 2.0.
  • Only Kivy toolkit is working. I’m sure that other people can enhance it to add other toolkit recipes. But for example, pygame is not gonna to work because the android project is OpenGL ES 2.0: pygame drawing will not work.

I hope you’ll like it :)

We would like to thank Renpy / PGS4A for its initial pygame for android project

Posted on

Introducing “Python for Android”

I’m glad to share a new project called Python for Android. The goal of this project is to package your python application into an APK.

https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android

The project is under the umbrella of Kivy organization, but is not designed to be limited to Kivy only. Read the documentation to correctly install the NDK/SDK Android, and set the needed environment variables.

The packaging is done in 4 steps:
1. Ensure you have Android SDK/NDK downloaded and correctly installed
2. Ensure you have some environment set
3. Create a Python distribution containing the selected modules
4. Use that distribution to build an APK of your Python application

Creating the python distribution is as simple as that:

# create a simple distribution with python + PIL + Kivy
./distribute.sh -m "pil kivy"

# create a distribution with python + openssl + pil + kivy
./distribute.sh -m "openssl pil kivy"

A directory dist/default will be created, including the result of the whole arm compilation.
Available libraries as for today: jpeg pil png sdl sqlite3 pygame kivy android libxml2 libxslt lxml ffmpeg openssl.

The second step is a little bit harder, since you need to provide more information for Android:

cd dist/default
./build.py --package org.test.touchtracer --name touchtracer \
--version 1.0 --dir ~/code/kivy/examples/demo/touchtracer debug installd

# --package: java name of your application
# --name: title of your application
# --version: version of your application
# --dir: location of your application containing the main.py

Then you’ll get a nicely bin/touchtracer-1.0-debug.apk

Pro:

  • A blacklist.txt file that can be used to exclude files in the final APK
  • Reusable distribution for other applications
  • Modular recipes architecture
  • Be able to build independents python distributions

Cons:

  • You need a main.py file that will be used for starting your application
  • Only one java bootstrap available, using OpenGL ES 2.0.
  • Only Kivy toolkit is working. I’m sure that other people can enhance it to add other toolkit recipes. But for example, pygame is not gonna to work because the android project is OpenGL ES 2.0: pygame drawing will not work.

I hope you’ll like it 🙂

We would like to thank Renpy / PGS4A for its initial pygame for android project

Posted on

Kivy programming contest #1

Kivy, an open source project for building cross platform applications and user interfaces, is announcing its 1st programming contest. The contest will start with the publication of official rules on January 1st. Registrations will be accepted through January 25th, and submissions will be accepted through January 31st. Prizes include Nvidia Tegra 2 android tablets from NotionInk, One-year “bronze” plans and t-shirts.

The goal of the contest is to encourage interested developers to learn more about Kivy, which is a cross platform Application and User Interface software library for the python programming language. Kivy applications run on Linux, Windows, OSX, Android (and iOS). The framework supports most inputs protocols and devices like WM_Touch, WM_Pen, Mac OS X Trackpad and Magic Mouse, single/multi touch screens, Mtdev, Linux Kernel HID, TUIO, and uses pure hardware accelerated rendering to enable developers to really take user interfaces to a new level.

The contest is sponsored by NotionInk, an indian company that designs tablets PCs, and Github, a web-based hosting service for software developments projects.

Join the contest at : http://kivy.org/#contest

Posted on

Kivy programming contest #1

Kivy, an open source project for building cross platform applications and user interfaces, is announcing its 1st programming contest. The contest will start with the publication of official rules on January 1st. Registrations will be accepted through January 25th, and submissions will be accepted through January 31st. Prizes include Nvidia Tegra 2 android tablets from NotionInk, One-year “bronze” plans and t-shirts.

The goal of the contest is to encourage interested developers to learn more about Kivy, which is a cross platform Application and User Interface software library for the python programming language. Kivy applications run on Linux, Windows, OSX, Android (and iOS). The framework supports most inputs protocols and devices like WM_Touch, WM_Pen, Mac OS X Trackpad and Magic Mouse, single/multi touch screens, Mtdev, Linux Kernel HID, TUIO, and uses pure hardware accelerated rendering to enable developers to really take user interfaces to a new level.

The contest is sponsored by NotionInk, an indian company that designs tablets PCs, and Github, a web-based hosting service for software developments projects.

Join the contest at : http://kivy.org/#contest

Posted on

Kivy 1.0.8 released ! What’s next ?

101 days after 1.0.7, Kivy 1.0.8 have been released (changelog).

This release include:

  • New widgets: Virtual Keyboard, Accordion, ProgressBar
  • Video support on android – Python bindings for ffmpeg have been done and are available on github. Theses are focused to be usable on android within Kivy project, but any help to clean and make the code more crossplatform is welcome !
  • Scroll wheel support in scrollview
  • + 1.6x more performance on Kivy langage
  • Support for GIF image + set of images in Zip files
  • Bezier and stipple lines in graphics instructions
  • … and lot of improvements and fixes !

A documentation translation project have been started (thanks for Sphinx for generating gettext translations automatically from python autodoc). Help us at: http://translation.kivy.org/.

And now, where to go ?

The roadmap is not written, since what we do is mostly depending of our interests / jobs / contributions.
But community is growing fast ! I see $N multistroke recognizer, GSOC integration (better macosx integration), iOS port, better android packaging, unit test, better desktop integration, widget theming support, 3D graphics instructions…

If you still hesitating about using Kivy… just look at the frontpage for the current awesome projects made by the community. And they are lot of others projects going to be released during the next month ! We are also glad to see some big companies to use Kivy as the base for building their products.
If you have also cool project going on, don’t hesitate to share :)

To finish, here is a video from Cyril that playing on Icarus Touch, an instrument that use Kivy for his UI. Awesome work !

Posted on

Kivy 1.0.8 released ! What’s next ?

101 days after 1.0.7, Kivy 1.0.8 have been released (changelog).

This release include:

  • New widgets: Virtual Keyboard, Accordion, ProgressBar
  • Video support on android – Python bindings for ffmpeg have been done and are available on github. Theses are focused to be usable on android within Kivy project, but any help to clean and make the code more crossplatform is welcome !
  • Scroll wheel support in scrollview
  • + 1.6x more performance on Kivy langage
  • Support for GIF image + set of images in Zip files
  • Bezier and stipple lines in graphics instructions
  • … and lot of improvements and fixes !

A documentation translation project have been started (thanks for Sphinx for generating gettext translations automatically from python autodoc). Help us at: http://translation.kivy.org/.

And now, where to go ?

The roadmap is not written, since what we do is mostly depending of our interests / jobs / contributions.
But community is growing fast ! I see $N multistroke recognizer, GSOC integration (better macosx integration), iOS port, better android packaging, unit test, better desktop integration, widget theming support, 3D graphics instructions…

If you still hesitating about using Kivy… just look at the frontpage for the current awesome projects made by the community. And they are lot of others projects going to be released during the next month ! We are also glad to see some big companies to use Kivy as the base for building their products.
If you have also cool project going on, don’t hesitate to share 🙂

To finish, here is a video from Cyril that playing on Icarus Touch, an instrument that use Kivy for his UI. Awesome work !