Setup/Creating A Simple Application

What is Kivy?

Kivy is a python module that allows for the creation of cross compatible applications using python. It makes it very easy to reuse the same code on IOS, Andorid, Mac, Windows, Linux and virtually all other well known operating systems. Creating apps with kivy is great as your code works on every kind of device. Kivy is similar to TKinter in the way you develop apps. It allows you to create a GUI using widgets and layouts.

Installing Kivy

For detailed instructions on all operating systems please visit the kivy website.

Before we can start using kivy we must download and install it. The easiest way to do this is to use pip. To test if you have pip in your system path open up cmd and type pip.

If you do not receive any errors you can continue with the instructions.

If this did NOT work then you need to add pip to your system path. There are multiple ways to do this but the easiest is to modify your python installation and add pip. You can watch the video starting at 2:00 to see how to do this.

If pip is working then you need to type the following commands into your command prompt.

python -m pip install --upgrade pip wheel setuptools
python -m pip install docutils pygments pypiwin32 kivy.deps.sdl2 kivy.deps.glew
python -m pip install kivy.deps.gstreamer
python -m pip install kivy.deps.angle
python -m pip install pygame
python -m pip install kivy

If the execution of all of those commands is successful you are ready to move on.

Creating our First App

Once we have Kivy installed and setup we can get to creating our first app.

The first thing we need to do is import the necessary modules.

import kivy
from kivy.app import App
from kivy.uix.label import Label

The best way to create apps using Kivy is to do so using OOP. Therefore, we need to create a class to represent our window. This class will inherit from the App class that we imported above. This means it will take all functionally from App. In doing so all we have to do to make our class functional is implement a method build() which will tell Kivy what to place on the screen.

class MyApp(App):
    def build(self):
        return Label(text="tech with tim")

We simply return a label that says "tech with tim".

Running our App

Believe it or not we have just created our first app. To run it we need to add the following code to the end of our program.

if __name__ == "__main__":
    MyApp().run()

Now if we run the program we should see the following.

Full Code

import kivy
from kivy.app import App
from kivy.uix.label import Label


class MyApp(App):
    def build(self):
        return Label(text="tech with tim")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    MyApp().run()