A Cross-platform Framework for NUI – Kivy

Hello All,

Happy New Year All!

We have been rather quiet on what’s happening at our end on future products and developments, but today I want to share a rather unique project called Kivy. Remember the earlier reference to Python? Let’s see what it was.

Kivy LogoKivy is an Open Source Library Project for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps. It can use natively most inputs protocols and devices like WM_Touch, WM_Pen, Mac OS X Trackpad and Magic Mouse, Mtdev, Linux Kernel HID, TUIO. A multi-touch mouse simulator is included.

Check out this video of Kivy on Andoid.

Kivy is 100% free to use, under LGPL 3 licence. The toolkit is professionally developed, backed and used. You can use it in a product and sell your product.

The framework is stable and has a documented API, plus a programming guide to help for in the first step.

The graphics engine is built over OpenGL ES 2, using modern and fast way of doing graphics.

To understand more, just take a look at this (my personal favorite):

The toolkit is coming with more than 20 widgets designed to be extensible. Many parts are written in C using Cython, tested with regression tests.

Kivy is a community project, led by professional software developers. For more information on Kivy, you can get in touch with Mathie Virbel, Thomas Hansen and Christopher Denter here.

Why bother? Read this LINK.

Notion Ink is an active contributor for this project, and once you go through the gallery here, you’d see what Eden and Genesis would probably be able to do.

Download this app here to play around (it’s a presentation tool, and you might take a while to getting use to it as it is still in development. Hint: tap icons again to clear view…).

You can download Kivy from this link for your Macs, PC and Linux platforms as well.

Kivy is a powerful tool, and shares our philosophy of enriching user experience and promoting community collaboration. Notion Ink is proud to support Kivy and their latest venture to accelerate development, a Programming Contest.

This competition will help you learn more about the project, build some exciting apps (you can be a programmer of any domain) and help improve the project. Head over to this link for more information: http://kivy.org/#contest

This is going to be a very impressive year, specially because it will let me explain what are we doing, finally! 🙂 Happy New Year Again!

Warm Regards

Rohan Shravan

43 thoughts on “A Cross-platform Framework for NUI – Kivy”

  4. Happy newAlthough you have spoken about the technology. You have not yet spoken about what NI is doing in this regard ?

  7. Hi, very nice post! thx Rohan ! Good to here that kind of news (especially about eden and Genesis 🙂 )
    Once again : Happy New Year !

  11. rohans wandering eye…….pie in the sky

    ‘The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.’

  16. Happy New year to all.
    Just imagine when people get to together to create something awesome for the sake of humanity: an awesome product is always born.
    Examples include Linux, Android. Now Kivy. I see future in that. It feels like some alien’s display screen on its space ship’s dashboard!

  17. If all humans shared their knowledge to make our lives awesome. Where there are no patent wars. We would be drinking coffee with alien brothers on some mombo jombo planet. Planet MJ?!

  19. Looks pretty and interesting, kinda reminds me of Eden when it was first described, or that cool weather app in your demo, or pretty much every idea coming out of NI. And like them, the execution and availability, or lack thereof, will dictate whether the hype was worth it.

    Am I the only one wanting to have a stable and mature Adam and/or Eden before NI goes off to try to revolutionize the world once again?

  20. pie in the sky quote
    The phrase wasn’t taken up until the Second World War, when it began to be used figuratively to refer to any prospect of future happiness which was unlikely ever to be realized.

    or

    replace jam with pie.

  21. It’s a cross-platform python-based toolkit optimised for multi-touch devices.

  22. Looks really nice. I’ve installed it on my linux laptop, perhaps I’ll play with it a bit under linux before trying to make android packages. When you say “contribute” do you mean financially (which they acknowledge on their blog), or also code?

  23. A technical question about adam.
    He seems to only handle two-touch in all the implementations I’ve seen.
    Is this a physical limitation, or an android level limitation?

  24. Thanks Rahul, but what does that mean in English? Sorry but for the tech challenged like me, this still doesn’t make much sense. Will this help developers build apps for touchscreens? Can’t they build apps without it? Or does Kivy just make it easier? That kind of explanation may be more useful for us. Right Vector66?

  25. Well, only someone familiar with programming needs to understand what it means… Do you program? What language do you use? Android uses java, but a lot of people in the desktop world like python. This project seems to be intended to help python programmers build android apps, as well as apps for other systems. It is, of course, intended to make things easy — all toolkits aim to do that. Other popular cross-platform toolkits are Qt (C++, not really available for android), Gtk (popular on linux, but again not android), etc.

    For a better explanation, read the kivy docs and examples 🙂

  28. @Vector66
    Yeah Mike, I think so too. Would be good to get an official answer. I think I read “two-touch” long ago somewhere but I just wasn’t sure if that was an “eden-based” answer or an “adam-based” answer.

  29. On another matter, I’d just like to say that for me the most excellent part of this post is the phrase:

    “This is going to be a very impressive year, specially because it will let me explain what are we doing, finally!”

    Tell us – oh great one – what have you been planning? 😀

    peaceout adamfreaks

  33. Hey! I reminds me of the framework Sencha Touch (www.sencha.com).
    For those that don’t know it, it’s a JavaScript framework that is optimized for touchscreens. What is interesting is that it allows to distribute your application through the internet and is not tightly linked to a platform.

  35. Anyone observed the CES Exhibitor Directory?

    Notion Ink Design Labs has a stall this time and guess what? the brands listed are:
    1. notionink adam
    2. notionink eve

    Rohan, please please give us some awesome devices this time. Adam 1 was good but these days good is not just enough. Just give us a good display and hardware that ‘works’. I was desparate to get an Adam last time. But after the release I thought I could wait for the 2nd version 😦

  37. mrdeadlocked making terrific progress. has audio working:

    I/AudioFlinger( 91): Loaded primary audio interface from Default audio HW HAL (audio).

    Can’t wait for the the Beta Version.

  38. Hi Rohan,
    Are you planning to showcase the Eve phone from Notion Ink?

    “http://ces12.mapyourshow.com/5_0/exhibitor_details.cfm?exhid=T0009117”

    Got this initially from “http://www.mobilespedia.com/”

  40. think so Bikram 🙂 But at least this time they give proper specs and details unlike last time when they didnt tell us about our around 30 degree viewing angle – and the never enabled fm radio.

  41. This is truly amazing but….
    have you got least a full Alpha stage release for us yet if not a beta?

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