I just finished the Kivy tutorial on how to build a simple Pong Game. I must say, Kivy is a very interesting framework, and I plan on building some Android apps using it soon.

The framework makes heavy use of classes to describe each component of your application, and also has a simple language for rapidly building interfaces and binding them in Python. It has native support for multi-touch screens, which makes it an ideal platform to learn.

Tablets and smartphones are rather huge right now, and I don't see them going away anytime soon. Most users of a tablet or smartphone prefer an app over a website, I know I do. Kivy makes it relatively easy to create an app which is network connected, as it has native support for JSON calls, it manages the web request and decoding of the JSON object for you.

A small project I plan to implement using Kivy is a simple map viewer for the OHRRPGCE engine. I have previously created a full map editor in another language and understand the underlying file formats. I am curious how creating such an application in Kivy will fair. From what I have read in the documentations for Kivy, I will need to use a texture to map each map tileset onto. From these map tilesets, I would then blit the required tiles to a new texture for the actual map layers. I will use touch controls for panning the map around, similar to how Google maps works on a tablet. I hope to add features such as pinch to zoom and such, since Kivy does support scaling in OpenGL. I will explain the process throughout this blog for those who are interested in Kivy app development.

Another interesting project would be to create a Kivy app for this here blog, that way Android users can easily access this blog directly on their device using a nice user interface.