Ocular Software

How to use PyDev to develop and run Kivy Applications (on Windows)

Posted 23/11/12

So I found this awesome looking project called Kivy, which is a Python UI library that works across Windows, OSX, Linux, IOS and Android (pretty impressive!), and I decided I wanted to give it a try. Now I know a lot of people prefer working with editors like Vim and invoking their compilers/interpreters/debuggers manually, but I’m very much an IDE kind of a guy. So I set about trying to get Kivy up and running in my favourite Python IDE, PyDev.

I ran into trouble pretty quickly. Because Kivy has a lot of dependencies on other Python libraries, the developers have thoughtfully packaged Kivy up with everything it needs, including a Python interpreter. The down side of this is that it makes it a pain to install Kivy as an external library into an existing Python installation if you already have one, as you’d need to know exactly which files to copy over. The Kivy README says:

Install Kivy as a standard python module
========================================

Please refer to the install instructions in the complete README :
* Inside the kivy folder inside this one
* Kivy documentation at http://kivy.org/docs/

However, the ‘complete README’ doesn’t exist, and the online docs say nothing about how to install Kivy as a standard Python module. I tried asking on the mailing list (as had others in the past), and didn’t get much of a response.

So if you want to use Kivy from PyDev, you can’t use your existing Python interpreter. Instead, you need to set up and configure a new interpreter in PyDev. Without further ado, here are the step-by-step instructions, beginning right after you’ve downloaded the zip file from the Kivy website: Read more…

Fancy Cats

Posted 29/08/11

Fancy Cats

My partner, Bianca, has been busy over at her foodie blog, The Cooking Capers. She’s also spent a fair bit of time looking around at other blogs, and told me that she wanted something a bit different to the standard options for WordPress categories widgets.

Having learned the basics of PHP earlier this year, I set about creating one for her. It only took roughly one evening and one afternoon to create, but it’s now finished. It uses AJAX to expand the category with a list of posts when clicked on. If you want to know more (you do!), there’s more info here, or head over to the blog I linked above to see it in action.