Kivy Blueprints

Enhancements and eye candy

Now that our chat basically works, we can apply some finishing touches to it, for example, improve the chat log presentation. Since the client already displays anything that the server sends its way, we can easily use Kivy markup (BBCode-like markup language, discussed in Chapter 1, Building a Clock App) to style the conversation log.

To do this, let's assign a color to each user and then paint the nickname with this color and make it bold. This will help readability and generally look nicer than a wall of monochrome plain text.

We'll use the Flat UI color palette instead of generating purely random colors, because generating substantially different colors that look good when used together is by itself not an easy task. ...