Kivy – Open-source Python library for rapid development of applications

by albertzeyer • 12 years ago

154 47 12 years ago

revskill• 12 years ago

I've tried it, but the resulted built size is huge. How could a Hello World application (built for android) took 15 minutes to build, and about 60MB in size ?? Why not those measurement been told in the main site to tell other to try and use ?

ayrx• 12 years ago

I'm guessing this is because Kivy includes a Python interpreter and Python libraries in each APK?

okso• 12 years ago

The Python interpreter itself is only about 1.5-2 Mo. The issue is mainly related to the libraries.

anewhnaccount• 12 years ago

The actual apk can be as small as 5-6mb, but yes it's too big. Ideally common files to all Kivy applications (the python runtime and libraries) would only exist once, but that's a problem people can't quite agree how to solve. https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android/issues/202

rplnt• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure apps can have dependencies, so that looks like the best solution. Yes, users will be annoyed, but I think it's still better than various other "hacks".

inclemnet7• 12 years ago

Others have noted that this should not happen, but just to comment on the specifics; the size of a plain APK like a Hello World should be just 6-7MB. Anything else is files in the project path that haven't been excluded (e.g. big images in the project directory) or dependencies that the python-for-android tools have been instructed to include. I don't know what went wrong for you, but that size is highly atypical, and if you're ever interested we can help debug it.

It's possible to reduce the size further, one of our devs has recently been experimenting about this in particular and I think has got down to 4MB without too much difficulty. The problem is that reducing it much further starts to mean being more careful about blacklisting stuff like modules in the python standard library, which can be hard to do automatically without breaking dependencies. It's highligted some potential optimisations in kivy's internals though, so maybe we can make it easier to leave out some non-essential kivy components.

Just to be clear about the build time thing, compiling python + project dependencies may take a few minutes (e.g. your 15 minute figure), but subsequent builds don't need to repeat this and will take just a few seconds.

daGrevis• 12 years ago

Here's an application my co-worker built using Kivy. https://github.com/aigarius/photoriver

albertzeyer2• 12 years ago

I found this in my logs from 2013 and it looks really nice now.

Another example app with Kivy + SQLite: Image Viewer and Organizer, https://github.com/gau-veldt/ImageOrg

This is also interesting: http://libnui.github.io/nui3/ I'm not exactly sure anymore about the relation. Is Kivy based on libnui?

emmen• 12 years ago

No, kivy has no relation to libnui.

markdown• 12 years ago

ImageOrg

I see a few files, but no instructions. Isn't kivy supposed to be a GUI building tool?

Where is the exe or dmg file?

inclemnet7• 12 years ago

The user hasn't packaged this into a standalone executable (though this is possible with e.g. pyinstaller). You need to run the ImageOrg.py file with python.

meelooo2• 12 years ago

Kivy looks very nice but NUI is a very different beast (I'm the author). The main difference being that even though NUI is a complete multi-plateform framework that uses OpenGL for rendering, it has a strictly C++ API.

If you want to see apps built with NUI I just released reChord: http://bit.ly/rechord And also some very nice music apps with NUI: http://intua.net/products/beatmaker2/ http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/apps/genome-midi-sequencer/ http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/apps/bleepbox/

albertzeyer2• 12 years ago

In the GitHub description (https://github.com/kivy/kivy), it says about Kivy:

"Open source software library for creating NUI applications, running on Windows, Linux, MacOSX, Android and iOS"

I guess that is why I searched for NUI and I probably found your lib. I don't remember that I have heard that term "NUI" before.

jalanb• 12 years ago

Some nice looking apps there: well done!

therealmarv• 12 years ago

I think for 2D related apps/games which do not require the native OS UI controls this is a good choice.

kitd• 12 years ago

Nice.

I may try this on my daughter who has been asking to get into programming. I remember the buzz I got building simple visual apps in VB. This feels similar.

gadders• 12 years ago

Apart from the size issues mentioned below, how does this work on Android? Is it better than PhoneGap etc and closer to native apps?

inclemnet7• 12 years ago

It compiles the python interpreter for android/arm, then bundles this all together in an APK - along with much of the standard library and any extra modules the user wants. It also includes a java bootstrap app that interacts with the system, but does essentially nothing except initialise and display an opengl surface that kivy renders to - along with running the python interpreter on the user's kivy code.

This bootstrap is invisible to the user, you don't need to touch the java to use kivy. That said, kivy has some cool sister projects for using the normal java api - pyjnius for accessing java classes directly from python, and more recently plyer to provide a more pythonic wrapper to common things like vibration, sensors etc.

(The above is also mostly the same for the ios build process).

Is it better than PhoneGap etc and closer to native apps?

I would say more that it is just different, with advantages and disadvantages of its own. It doesn't use native widgets (though it's possible to create and use them in some ways with pyjnius), so it isn't different in this sense.

vdfs• 12 years ago

2048 app that use Kivy on android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.meltingroc...

bharatkhatri14• 12 years ago

I've always been confused about open-source projects that go big on marketing themselves.

Building a good community around open-source projects holds obvious advantages as you'd always need contributors to push the project through its future generations.

As far as I can see, Kivy is supported by a group of independent developers. Kivy (as a group) must have spent money in marketing the product, launching developer contests, publishing books on Kivy (I've seen a couple books on Kivy by O'reilly), and other stuff. I'm just curious to know in what other ways, apart from the need to grow the community around your project, does marketing your open-source project help? And is the money put into marketing the project contributed by the creators themselves?

inclemnet7• 12 years ago

Kivy (as a group) must have spent money in marketing the product

I don't think kivy (as a group) does anything except recently the contest, and things like maintaining a g+ account, mailing list, posting on hn or reddit if something intersting happens etc. - were you thinking of anything in particular here?

launching developer contests

This was funded entirely from sponsorship, you can see the list on the contest page (http://kivy.org/#contest).

publishing books on Kivy (I've seen a couple books on Kivy by O'reilly)

Publishers commission books because they think they will make money, not because kivy pays them to - actually, I don't think any of the core developer team have been directly involved in kivy books.

and other stuff

Honestly, not really - I can't think of any other expenses except small things like powering the website server.

I've always been confused about open-source projects that go big on marketing themselves.

I don't think kivy is really big on marketing itself - if anything, maybe the opposite. I've wondered before if its relatively unknown status (compared to phonegap etc) is at least partly because we don't advertise much, though it may just as well be that more people are interested in html.

Things like the developer contest are great to build interest and get the word out that kivy exists, and as you said yourself have obvious advantages in maintaining and growing the community - if this is 'going big' on marketing, I don't think that term is very meaningful.

thirtman6• 12 years ago

I confirm there was no money directly spent on promoting kivy. Most of our communication has been directly with the community, through help on irc/google-groups/SO and other places. We did start to improve communication on twitter/g+/facebook, but it's really on our own time, not paying any agency or specialist of these things.

For books, while we were contacted by a few publishers, none of the core-dev authored any, yet. We tried to give a hand, however, reviewing the books when we could, i personnaly reviewed O'Reilly's book, pointing out a few mistakes to the editor, and gave it a good review, as it was, in my opinion, a well written book with very good exemples and explanations. As it seems usual, i got a free book and a little payment for this (that i didn't expect at all when doing it, my motivation was that there was a need for good kivy books).

And i agree we should do more, if not on marketing, at least on communication (there are a few markets that kivy can fully or partially cover already, we don't want to limit these options, just help it grow where users want to use it), but users need to know about it, and to easily get a good understanding of what's possible to do with it. We have a lot of recurring questions about that, as well as people discovering us and asking why they didn't heard about us sooner.

I do think the community could be way bigger, but we need to adapt the tools we use to communicate, irc works very well up to the hundred of connected users we have, probably less at more, and waste a lot of energy in saying the same things over and over again (although the direct interaction with our users is highly appreciable), SO seems to make reuse of explanations much more common, and is sometime more effective than direct documentation.

Anyway, i'm getting away from the point, will cut it there. :)

trapprkeepr• 12 years ago

You are absolutely right, take a look at their expensive marketing at work. https://i.imgur.com/rZ6pQU5.png

__Joker• 12 years ago

Anybody knows of any app built for iOS using Kivy ?

inclemnet7• 12 years ago

There's a (probably not exhaustive) list at https://github.com/kivy/kivy/wiki/List-of-Kivy-Projects#kivy... .

JasonFruit2• 12 years ago

I have a couple hymnal apps in the Play Store built with Kivy, and reviews suggest that performance is a problem for some people, especially scrolling through long views. I'm in the process of rewriting them using HTML and JavaScript in a WebView.

That being said, Kivy is really nice to work with; the documentation is good and it's a well thought-out library. I'd enjoy using it for future apps that don't happen to have long views to scroll through.

thirtman6• 12 years ago

Did you use ListView, or did you roll your own ScrollView managed content? We are sorry about the state of ListView currently, and plan to redesign it soon, it's really not optimal currently, and not offering a very useful interface either, so maybe you could fix you issues just putting a GridLayout in a ScrollView and fill it as needed (i documented a way to do a publisher/consumer using threads on my blog, it's efficient for these kind of things).

http://blog.tshirtman.fr/2014/1/14/publisher-consumer-model-...

JasonFruit2• 12 years ago

Initially I used the ListView, but found performance problems on every device. I then rolled my own using a layout in a ScrollView, and it's better, but still troublesome. I'll compare what I've done to what you wrote about and see if I can improve matters.

MrBra2• 12 years ago

Would it be correct to say that Kivy is the Python equivalent for Ruby Shoes? In which aspect the one or the other is more powerful?

aikah2• 12 years ago

Can you write IOS and Android Apps with shoes?

MrBra2• 12 years ago

They won't be native apps anyway but browser based apps, so as new Shoes is going to use Javascript (via Opal) and HTML as a rendering engine, then yes you can. Any other actual differences or points of strength worth noting?

aikah2• 12 years ago

I never was able to run it on my computer unfortunatly(mackbook ,bootcamp,windows 7).

But it looks great.

nemesisj2• 12 years ago

Anyone tried Kivy for game development? I'm interested in brushing up my Python and was thinking about making a game that could be OpenGL accelerated, and it seemed like a good match.

thirtman6• 12 years ago

Yes, you can see examples of games done with kivy in the two contests (kivy.org/#contest), and there are also a few games on the market, it's also interesting to look at kovak's efforts on kivent.org, a 2D game engine built on top of kivy and cymunk, which seems like the way to go for games with a lot of actors.

nemesisj2• 12 years ago

Cool, thanks! I'll have a look at that. Does the kivent.org stuff support Tiled?

pacofvf• 12 years ago

Is there any plotting library I can use with Kivy?, something of the likes of D3.js (http://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery)

jardaroh• 12 years ago

matlibplot is one of the best and most extensive plotting libraries. You also have d3py that is a d3.js implementation in python. Do a google search for python graph or python plot and you will find plenty.

chadillac• 12 years ago

Messed with Kivy about 6 months ago, while I love what it is, it suffers from PyGame'ism. Yes you can write games and such, but the end result always just feels bloated and performance hungry. I ended up going with Corona (http://coronalabs.com/), and it is/was awesome for the game I was building.

arstudio• 12 years ago

I wrote a Kivy app for a multi-touch table a few years ago as my Masters project in CSE.

I appreciated being able to develop on my Mac, run it on the table using Windows, and even got it running on an iPad.

Getting the environment set up to deploy to iOS was complex (especially cross compiling non-standard Python libraries), but it has been a few years.

Kivy – Open-source Python library for rapid development of applications

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