Creating Apps in Kivy

Chapter 1. Introducing Kivy

Kivy is a modern graphical user interface toolkit. It allows you to easily develop natural interfaces for a wide selection of devices. It is attractive to a variety of developers for a few key reasons:

• Kivy has elegant built-in support for multitouch devices.
• Kivy is the only viable way to code in Python on mobile devices.
• Kivy replaces the horrible APIs of earlier graphical interfaces like HTML and CSS.
• Kivy allows you to maintain a single application for numerous operating systems.

Whatever your reasons for studying Kivy, I’m glad you found this book. You’ll be going step by step through Kivy basics to create and deploy a fully functional application. Each chapter presents a working program that you will expand on in subsequent chapters. I’ve chosen to develop a weather application with you, partially because it’s at the right complexity level, but mostly because there aren’t any decent open source weather applications in the F-Droid open source Android market!

While I hope this book appeals to a diverspe array of developers, I have a specific audience in mind as I write it. As with any job description, you don’t have to completely fit this profile, but it will help you to understand who I’m thinking about and how you might differ. My intended audience:

• Has beginner to intermediate programming skills and has read the Python tutorial
• Is not intimately acquainted with advanced Python concepts, but is eager to learn
• Wants to learn about programming ...