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Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

kivy.org

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Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#31

Post by dessant »

andybak wrote: post #9

I always keep my eye on the Play Store for any production apps using Kivy. It used to be the case that they all had a fairly unconventional (game-like) UI or a fairly clunky one. Can anyone point me to a Kivy app that shows - if not totally native looking - at least a fairly standard approach to developing an Android UI? (on the plus side - Kivy apps always seem smooth and responsive on Android) EDIT - I found this p…

I think game-like style is not typical for Kivy apps which do not aim to be games, though looking native has not been Kivy's goal either.

I've recently released Viorise, a video rank tracker aimed for desktop platforms (https://viorise.com), though it may also qualify as an Android UI, I've followed Material Design guidelines for most of the widgets and the overall layout of the app.

There have been some proposals for theming (https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/691), but none of them were truly favored by the community. There are also a couple of third-party approaches like KivyMD, or FlatKivy. What they lack is a swappable theme, since there is no true theming support, they are just styled widgets.

Finding a good way to make a declared theme independent from widgets, but still keeping it customizable at runtime has been our main issue. The difficulty comes from theming being much more than a backgorund color, we should also be able to define certain behaviors and interactions, animations etc. These are rather easy and IMHO pleasant to achieve in the scope of widgets, but we haven't yet found a good way to decouple them.

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#33

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

eivarv wrote: post #25
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like about once a year I'll get the craving to build Python desktop GUIs, and so far I've never been able to get PyQt installed on my Mac.

What trouble have you had with PyQt? I've never had any issue installing PyQt (or PySide) whatsoever, though I usually use Conda [1] with the Anaconda Python distribution, rather than the system default (which you shouldn't use, IIRC) or the official one from Python.org. The easiest way to get started is probably with the Miniconda [2] Python distribution. I'm not sure if Conda pulls down Qt, though, or if you have t…

I can't remember off the top of my head alas:(

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#34

Post by stuaxo »

dessant wrote: post #31
andybak wrote: post #9

I always keep my eye on the Play Store for any production apps using Kivy. It used to be the case that they all had a fairly unconventional (game-like) UI or a fairly clunky one. Can anyone point me to a Kivy app that shows - if not totally native looking - at least a fairly standard approach to developing an Android UI? (on the plus side - Kivy apps always seem smooth and responsive on Android) EDIT - I found this p…

I think game-like style is not typical for Kivy apps which do not aim to be games, though looking native has not been Kivy's goal either. I've recently released Viorise, a video rank tracker aimed for desktop platforms ( https://viorise.com ), though it may also qualify as an Android UI, I've followed Material Design guidelines for most of the widgets and the overall layout of the app. There have been some proposals…

It sounds like something like CSS would be really useful.

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#35

Post by mixedCase »

vanous wrote: post #17
inclemnet wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's still generally the case that Kivy apps tend to use the default (clunky) theme or something more custom, but there has recently been some user activity around alternatives, e.g. a set material design themed widgets ( https://github.com/kivymd/KivyMD ). I'm not sure if any apps using this have been published on the Play store. We've been discussing how to include more unified themeing capabilities in Kivy…

For those seeking screenshots, i have found https://kivymd.github.io/ This definitively looks interesting. I had previously tested kivy and only had little issues with pyjnius and font sizes as switching between versions. More modern looks sounds great, might the resurrect that old project.

Hi, I'm the main developer of KivyMD, very cool to see it pop up here!.

I must warn that it's still in alpha status, although being used to develop business applications. Any bug reports and PRs are appreciated, and anyone has any questions, just shoot!

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#38

Post by philondrejack »

I've been writing a desktop application with Kivy for the past few months. It has pros and cons.

The biggest con I have found is that because it's geared mostly for mobile it doesn't natively support multiple windows. There are work around to this, including the way that I solved it here... https://medium.com/@PhilipAndrews/the-kivy-frontier-multiple....

But aside from that it's so easy to get a reasonably good looking application up and running.

Would I recommend it for cross-platform app development? I can't say with confidence.

For quick roll-out or prototyping? Yes, definitely.

I really hope this community grows over time. The people working on the framework have been very responsive when I've had questions.

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#39

Post by sbrother »

andybak wrote: post #9

I always keep my eye on the Play Store for any production apps using Kivy. It used to be the case that they all had a fairly unconventional (game-like) UI or a fairly clunky one. Can anyone point me to a Kivy app that shows - if not totally native looking - at least a fairly standard approach to developing an Android UI? (on the plus side - Kivy apps always seem smooth and responsive on Android) EDIT - I found this p…

I'm using it to develop www.trebel.la, which will hopefully be out on the App Store this fall. But it also has a pretty unconventional (game-like) UI. IMO, if I wanted to build something that was well served by standard Android or iOS widgets, I would just write native apps. Kivy will never look or feel just like a native app, but since it has evolved from a game engine, it's a great choice for apps like mine that are part game, part standard UI.

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#40

Post by mixmastamyk »

shadowmint wrote: post #30
asafira wrote: post #8

Can anyone comment on specifically how Kivy is better than the other options available (e.g., QT?). How have other peoples' experiences been? Some comments say small community, but that seems like it could be a large drawback honestly. Does that mean, for example, there are few(er) stack overflow posts about it, and you are likely to run into some painful issues along the way? How well does it integrate with matplotl…

QT is in every way a better choice, except for the license. Kivy is great, fun to use, but it suffers for the same thing that many python applications do: package management is a pain, packing is difficult (especially dependencies with c libraries), applications are slow, there are no threads (any action locks the UI), the bridge to native code is quite troublesome (especially on IOS), it uses a custom DSL for UI lay…

Why do you think packaging is a pain?

It is possible to do things in a background thread, it may not use all cpus, but it won't block:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37502084/download-file-wi...

https://github.com/kivy/kivy/wiki/Working-with-Python-thread...

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