From david at boddie.org.uk  Wed Jun  1 08:40:12 2016
From: david at boddie.org.uk (David Boddie)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2016 14:40:12 +0200
Subject: [Mobile-sig] A tale of two cellphones
Message-ID: <201606011440.12811.david@boddie.org.uk>

On Wed May 18 22:15:09 EDT 2016, Russell Keith-Magee wrote:

> If you?re coming to PyCon US, I?ll be speaking about this work. If you?re
> not? well.. the videos will be online shortly after, I suppose :-)

Yes, very shortly after, it seems. :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqdpK9KjGgQ

That was quite an epic presentation. The audience must have been a bit
overwhelmed by the end!

Rather perversely, given that I have no interest in iOS, I found the
Objective C part the most interesting. Perhaps it's because I've done things
with C bindings in the past.

Did you get more feedback after the talk?

David

From dimaqq at gmail.com  Wed Jun  1 08:45:48 2016
From: dimaqq at gmail.com (Dima Tisnek)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2016 14:45:48 +0200
Subject: [Mobile-sig] A tale of two cellphones
In-Reply-To: <201606011440.12811.david@boddie.org.uk>
References: <201606011440.12811.david@boddie.org.uk>
Message-ID: <CAGGBzX+OqqCQkOMm7vt6POLEoP=ZyybXmBpKpszUKLtUKeXtHA@mail.gmail.com>

Awesome!

On 1 June 2016 at 14:40, David Boddie <david at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On Wed May 18 22:15:09 EDT 2016, Russell Keith-Magee wrote:
>
>> If you?re coming to PyCon US, I?ll be speaking about this work. If you?re
>> not? well.. the videos will be online shortly after, I suppose :-)
>
> Yes, very shortly after, it seems. :-)
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqdpK9KjGgQ
>
> That was quite an epic presentation. The audience must have been a bit
> overwhelmed by the end!
>
> Rather perversely, given that I have no interest in iOS, I found the
> Objective C part the most interesting. Perhaps it's because I've done things
> with C bindings in the past.
>
> Did you get more feedback after the talk?
>
> David
> _______________________________________________
> Mobile-sig mailing list
> Mobile-sig at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-sig

From guido at python.org  Fri Jun  3 01:58:59 2016
From: guido at python.org (Guido van Rossum)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2016 22:58:59 -0700
Subject: [Mobile-sig] A tale of two cellphones
In-Reply-To: <CAGGBzX+OqqCQkOMm7vt6POLEoP=ZyybXmBpKpszUKLtUKeXtHA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <201606011440.12811.david@boddie.org.uk>
 <CAGGBzX+OqqCQkOMm7vt6POLEoP=ZyybXmBpKpszUKLtUKeXtHA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAP7+vJJdptc=8+o2igqc95gZSRjtF0k8isQYBfCv9nCCNb3sLA@mail.gmail.com>

OMG This presentation was awesome. Good luck Russell!!

On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 5:45 AM, Dima Tisnek <dimaqq at gmail.com> wrote:
> Awesome!
>
> On 1 June 2016 at 14:40, David Boddie <david at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
>> On Wed May 18 22:15:09 EDT 2016, Russell Keith-Magee wrote:
>>
>>> If you?re coming to PyCon US, I?ll be speaking about this work. If you?re
>>> not? well.. the videos will be online shortly after, I suppose :-)
>>
>> Yes, very shortly after, it seems. :-)
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqdpK9KjGgQ
>>
>> That was quite an epic presentation. The audience must have been a bit
>> overwhelmed by the end!
>>
>> Rather perversely, given that I have no interest in iOS, I found the
>> Objective C part the most interesting. Perhaps it's because I've done things
>> with C bindings in the past.
>>
>> Did you get more feedback after the talk?
>>
>> David
>> _______________________________________________
>> Mobile-sig mailing list
>> Mobile-sig at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-sig
> _______________________________________________
> Mobile-sig mailing list
> Mobile-sig at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-sig



-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

From gabriel.pettier at gmail.com  Sat Jun  4 15:08:22 2016
From: gabriel.pettier at gmail.com (Gabriel Pettier)
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2016 21:08:22 +0200
Subject: [Mobile-sig] A tale of two cellphones
In-Reply-To: <CAP7+vJJdptc=8+o2igqc95gZSRjtF0k8isQYBfCv9nCCNb3sLA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <201606011440.12811.david@boddie.org.uk>
 <CAGGBzX+OqqCQkOMm7vt6POLEoP=ZyybXmBpKpszUKLtUKeXtHA@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAP7+vJJdptc=8+o2igqc95gZSRjtF0k8isQYBfCv9nCCNb3sLA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20160604190822.GB17740@alice>

Indeed nice and very impressive presentation, congrats Russel, (and 
respect for the lightning talk as well, not an easy subject). Although 
we certainly diverge on the objectives, it's good to see innovative 
solutions in this space. And it also makes us think about what we can 
improve on our side.

Regards.

On Thu, Jun 02, 2016 at 10:58:59PM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>OMG This presentation was awesome. Good luck Russell!!
>
>On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 5:45 AM, Dima Tisnek <dimaqq at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Awesome!
>>
>> On 1 June 2016 at 14:40, David Boddie <david at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
>>> On Wed May 18 22:15:09 EDT 2016, Russell Keith-Magee wrote:
>>>
>>>> If you?re coming to PyCon US, I?ll be speaking about this work. If you?re
>>>> not? well.. the videos will be online shortly after, I suppose :-)
>>>
>>> Yes, very shortly after, it seems. :-)
>>>
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqdpK9KjGgQ
>>>
>>> That was quite an epic presentation. The audience must have been a bit
>>> overwhelmed by the end!
>>>
>>> Rather perversely, given that I have no interest in iOS, I found the
>>> Objective C part the most interesting. Perhaps it's because I've done things
>>> with C bindings in the past.
>>>
>>> Did you get more feedback after the talk?
>>>
>>> David
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Mobile-sig mailing list
>>> Mobile-sig at python.org
>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-sig
>> _______________________________________________
>> Mobile-sig mailing list
>> Mobile-sig at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-sig
>
>
>
>-- 
>--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
>_______________________________________________
>Mobile-sig mailing list
>Mobile-sig at python.org
>https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-sig

From david at boddie.org.uk  Thu Jun  9 06:37:16 2016
From: david at boddie.org.uk (David Boddie)
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2016 12:37:16 +0200
Subject: [Mobile-sig] Q&A: Guido van Rossum on Python's next steps
Message-ID: <201606091237.16583.david@boddie.org.uk>

Posting this link here because there's a mobile angle early in the article:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3078633/application-development/qa-guido-van-
rossum-on-pythons-next-steps.html

"Unfortunately, the standard CPython source code almost, but not quite,
 compiles to a binary that runs correctly on an Android phone or iPhone.
 There are a number of people who are really interested in moving that
 forward and contributing patches and little things like how you check that
 you're on an Android platform. It's moving forward, though not as fast as I
 wish it would move forward. But then again, I'm not developing mobile apps
 myself, so I am not too motivated to dive into that myself. But I'm very
 happy to see that it's happening."

If the PSF also wishes that progress with mobile Python was faster then,
with https://github.com/pybee/paying-the-piper in mind, there are ways to
make it happen. ;-)

David

From alexanderjohntaylor at gmail.com  Sun Jun 19 11:17:37 2016
From: alexanderjohntaylor at gmail.com (Alexander Taylor)
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2016 16:17:37 +0100
Subject: [Mobile-sig] python-for-android 0.4 released, and general update
Message-ID: <daa5a6f5-dfeb-10f7-cae6-ca738ee990f6@gmail.com>

Hi all,

Per the title, we (the Kivy devs) have just released python-for-android
(p4a) 0.4 [1]. This release in particular is a major one because it's
the culmination of a lot of recent work rewriting the python-for-android
packager to be more general, not just for Kivy's use but to support
other kinds of Python apps. I've meant to say something about it here
for a while, and this seems like a good milestone to bring it up.

p4a is a packaging tool for bundling Python itself, plus any extra
Python modules or other dependencies (including those with compiled
components such as numpy or Kivy itself), into an Android project that
can be compiled into a normal APK and run on any Android device. On a
technical level it's concerned specifically with compiling these
dependencies for the Android architecture and environment, so that
Python itself runs just the same as on the desktop. This comes with all
the standard advantages and disadvantages: on the bad side, Python can
be a little slow to start and there's no practical way to build a GUI
with native Java widgets (though small numbers of Java widgets can be
instantiated and manipulated via JNI). On the other hand, if these
aren't a concern (e.g. with games, certain kinds of apps, or just
personal preference) the big advantage is that most Python modules work
exactly as on the desktop, and even C extensions often require little or
no modification.

In the past, p4a only supported a basic Pygame backend for Kivy's own
use, but we noticed that a number of other projects were forking the
build tools and having to hack out the Kivy-specific bits (duplicating a
lot of work) to build other kinds of application. p4a now is a much more
general packager supporting multiple bootstrap types, each holding the
Java and Android project code to start Python and create a specific kind
of GUI. These currently include SDL2 (works with Kivy or other wrappers
like PySDL2 or Vispy), a webview bootstrap for use with e.g. a Flask
backend, and Kivy's old Pygame backend. It's also possible to build a
gui-less Python script, and there's some preliminary support for
exporting the Python build for use in mainly-Java apps. Other projects
can now use p4a by just adding or adapting bootstrap code to their
purposes, and nothing depends on Kivy (or much else).

The rewrite has also removed some long-standing limitations and allowed
adding some important new features. These include experimental support
for Python 3 apps via the CrystaX NDK [2] (whose additions to Google's
NDK allow Python to compile without patching even on older Android
versions), support for multiple architectures, and a much improved
internal infrastructure to make supporting new compiled dependencies
much easier.

Looking to the future, there are still plenty of things to fix or
improve about running Python on Android this way. Building Python (2 or
3) is made much easier with CrystaX even without the recent improvements
in Android's libc or in Python itself (I'll admit I'm not too familiar
with the current state of Python patching for Android builds), but these
parts of the toolchain need work to be as stable as the old patched
Python 2.7. Using platform-specific APIs can be pretty easy with JNI
wrappers like pyjnius or rubicon-java, but it can also be annoying and
it would probably be preferable to support more of them with Python API
wrappers like Plyer [3] instead. And of course, python-for-android is
still based around compiling everything locally, contributing to the
fact that it doesn't work on Windows and meaning that even on Linux or
OS X the process is more laborious than really necessary for most users.
We've focused on this method because it has to be done somewhere, and
binary distribution gets complicated if trying to be clever about
dependency options, but a major improvement would be to support
precompiled distributions so that users can build APKs without needing
to compile anything. I had this in mind when thinking about the new
toolchain, partly thanks to Russell setting an excellent example with
his BeeWare mobile distribution, so it shouldn't be too hard to start
supporting. It may even be possible to be clever about it, using wheels
built for Android.

So, that's the current state of python-for-android. Any comments,
questions or criticisms are very welcome!

Best,

Alexander


[1] https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android

[2] https://www.crystax.net/

[3] https://github.com/kivy/plyer

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