Kivy wrap for the summer

As I conclude my summer work on Kivy and Plyer, here’s a post to summarize all the contributions I have made. It would also be useful to start from here when I wish to revisit any of this in future.

To draw a comparison to the current state of Plyer development, this table shows a list of supported facades before the summer started:

If you have been following the updates, you would have come across my weekly progress posts over the last couple of months. Here’s a list of all such posts since mid-summer for easy access (also check out my mid-summer summary post):

1. I can haz commit access and other updates
2. Maintenance work in progress
3. Plyer on iOS
4. More, more facades

And in comparison to the table above, this is how the Plyer support looks like as of today after all these changes:

Of course there’s more than what meets the eye. There has been a lot of background work that went into writing them. This included understanding the individual platforms APIs and working with other Kivy projects — Pyjnius and Pyobjus that support this work. Some of these changes called for a re-write of old facades in order to follow a consistent approach. Since Plyer is at an early stage of development, I also contributed some maintenance code and writing build scripts.

In the beginning of August, I took a break from facade development for two weeks and made recommendations on making Kivy apps more accessible. I looked into existing projects that could be useful for us and pointed at a possible candidate that we could adapt for our purposes. Here are the two posts summarizing my investigations:

1. Towards Making Kivy Apps Accessible
2. Towards Making Kivy Apps Accessible – 2

At this point, I would also include a thank you note to everyone on #kivy and #plyer on freenode for helping me out whenever I got stuck. This was the first time I actively participated in IRC discussions over an extended period. I also tried to return the favor by offering help, when I could, to other new users. Apart from getting a chance to work with the Kivy community from all around the world (with so many timezones!), there were couple of other firsts as well that I experienced while working on the project. Those served as good learning experiences and a motivation for making contributions to open source.

Overall, it was a quite a fun experience contributing to kivy over the summer and I hope to continue doing so every now and then. Now as Kivy is gaining more popularity everyday, I hope to see many more users diving into writing code for it and be a part of this community. Hope these posts could also serve to point them to relevant development opportunities.