I had the chance to use Kivy to build a GUI for my Master's thesis. I was always on the irc channel and yes the community is small but I always got the help I needed from the creators as well. It's easy to use once you get the grasp of it. I used it as a proof of concept but was pretty happy with the result. That was 9 months ago so I'm not up to date with the latest release though.
I've been writing a desktop application with Kivy for the past few months. It has pros and cons.<p>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... <a href="https://medium.com/@PhilipAndrews/the-kivy-frontier-multiple.." rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@PhilipAndrews/the-kivy-frontier-multiple...</a>.<p>But aside from that it's so easy to get a reasonably good looking application up and running.<p>Would I recommend it for cross-platform app development? I can't say with confidence.<p>For quick roll-out or prototyping? Yes, definitely.<p>I really hope this community grows over time. The people working on the framework have been very responsive when I've had questions.
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.<p>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?<p>(on the plus side - Kivy apps always seem smooth and responsive on Android)<p>EDIT - I found this post from January: <a href="https://kivy.org/planet/2016/01/kivy-android-app%C2%A0showcase/" rel="nofollow">https://kivy.org/planet/2016/01/kivy-android-app%C2%A0showca...</a> Kognitivo looks interesting.
I do a lot of programming in Python, and found Kivy to be easy to use and thought it was pretty cool when I tried it out a while ago.<p><i>However:</i> Why would one want to use Kivy for desktop interfaces (as I see many comments mention), rather than native (e.g. Qt) or at least close to native UI-frameworks?<p>I think Kivy looks great for prototyping, experimental interfaces, and such, but I don't see why I would use it over something that lets me use native interface widgets.
Kivy's multiplatform support is impressive. An application I'm working on at the moment runs in X on Ubuntu, on Microsoft Windows and on a Raspberry Pi 3. On the latter Kivy draws the UI using the frame buffer directly, without X.<p>Kivy does have its quirks and oddities. From the top of my head:<p>- Want to set the background color on a widget? Gotta drop into GL-like drawcalls and add a coloured rectangle below your widget.<p>- On the Raspberry Pi, I see a strange behaviour where adding and removing elements from the widget hierarchy causes widgets to randomly not appear, or flicker, or old widgets to re-appear — even though the widget hierarchy looks "clean" on inspection. This problem doesn't occur on Linux using X, or on Windows, so I suspect the reason lies somewhere in the frame buffer inplementation.<p>Edit: Formatting
I've been using Kivy for a few months now. From my experience it's a great language/platform to develop proof of concepts and prototypes.<p>Main drawbacks:
- Community size
- It's missing some general styling capabilities<p>Because everything is in Python, it's really easy to get started. Give it a go!
Can anyone comment on specifically how Kivy is better than the other options available (e.g., QT?). How have other peoples' experiences been?<p>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 matplotlib? How easy is it to tweak its internal widgets to your liking?
Kivy seems well designed and easy to use - not just for multi-touch but general cross platform UI apps, and phone apps.<p>My only concern is that the community seems small and the site a little dated?
This is not a criticism, but last time I looked at Kivy, the environment seemed pretty fragmented and documentation/ tutorials far from ideal. i.e. pretty immature.<p>How is it looking right now? Can anyone point me to some good docs and tutorials?
It's interesting that this showed up here today. I just installed qpython on my phone yesterday so that I could play with Python while I am on the subway. It has the Kivy libs built in. The only down side is that I haven't figured out a good way to get the docs available offline so I can refer to them on my phone as well.<p>You might think that coding on a phone is super painful, but it is surprisingly fun when there is nothing else to do.