[Baypiggies] Does anyone know Kivy?

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Fri May 25 15:43:52 EDT 2018


Glen,

I've built some big applications with Kivy (as well as a couple of small
Android phone apps with it, like my own password keeper).  Once you have
figured it out, apps are fairly portable across Windows, Android, OS
X, and Linux (I haven't tried the iOS support).

Very ambitious project with lots of good stuff and many subprojects --
really an amazing laundry list of capabilities at
https://github.com/kivy, not to mention https://github.com/kivy-garden.
Some of the parts are brilliantly written, some not so much (IMO).  It's
interesting because *everything* an application developer touches is
Python -- no need for drops into C or C++ or Javascript when you're
using it.  And there are things like a reStructuredText rendering widget,
that support use of Python standards.

The integrated UI system designed for multi-touch (think phone)
platforms targets OpenGL directly, and on desktops works through SDL2.
And the focus on full-screen applications means that the default widget
set layout conventions will seem odd to desktop designers (maybe I
should just say they seemed odd to me), though they're fine once you get
used to them.

Since it's such a huge project -- an all-encompassing application
platform -- there are a few things broken, particularly in the
hard-to-test areas of UI and specific platform support.  There are some
known but undocumented graphics issues which don't seem to be getting
addressed, for instance.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/kivy-users/line$20width$20janssen%7Csort:date/kivy-users/A-bityxyoA0/NnPc5Y50BAAJ

And they in turn hold back things like the Matplotlib support, which
concerns me.  But skilled OpenGL volunteers are hard to come by.
Actually, there's so much in Kivy, the maintenance overhead might be
consuming the whole group.  Oh, and there's no Kivy solution for browser
apps, though Brython with WebGL might be a way forward.

Bill


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