[bbor]

A) this is most European website I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t tell you exactly why… perhaps it’s the train subconsciously affecting me.

2) this is first time I’ve ever seen mobile included as part of “Cross-Platform”, that’s pretty awesome. We’re living in the future, friends! Tho it also makes me shudder at the thought of the phrase “QT app development”…

III) At this point, why not just use web? What is a “truly cross platform UI framework” other than HTML? I’m currently developing a site that uses TS in the frontend and Python in the back, and that seemed like a nice Unix-y division of labor. What am I missing?

[jb1991]

> this is most European website I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t tell you exactly why… perhaps it’s the train subconsciously affecting me.

Actually the train on that page is from Japan.

[bbor]

I recently learned that Ireland isn’t really in Europe according to some Irish people, so I think this is final straw: I’m adding Japan to Europe. We may lack the technology to make it a physical reality (yet!) but their recent history and culture are quite European. I wish they were an option for emigration in a post-P2025 world, but AFAIK they are not at all interested in asylum seekers, American or otherwise ;(

[graemep]

Really? Where do they think it is? yes, its an island but no-one says Japan (or Sri Lanka, or Java) is not in Asia!

I have known a lot of Irish people (I mean either over here in the UK temporarily or first generation immigrants) and I have never heard anyone say that.

[KaiserPro]

> this is most European website

nice, I love casual exceptionalism in the morning.

> At this point, why not just use web

Because not everyone uses a "web stack". Moreover trying to learn a webstack is pretty hard. Sure JS is easy, but everything on top to make it more "productive" changes every 6 months. I mean yeah I could just use react, but Urgh, its nasty.

However the killer issue issue is hardware acceleration. Its possible to get kivy running at 60 FPS on a pi3. getting something to run at 60fps on web for the pi3 is bloody hard. Even though its python, it runs really fast, something not really possible in the browser.

[ranger_danger]

I think a lot of people dislike html/web-based apps, and they are not as responsive in some cases as well. I have seen some mobile browser implementations that explicitly put large delays (hundreds of ms) into their touch handlers for example. You can see a similar delay in a side-by-side comparison video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4CwVN9RRbE

[cglong]

Kivy's marketing seems to be targeting LOB apps. If I was going to develop one of those, I'd optimize for something standardized and easy to maintain (HTML/JS) vs. the performance benefits of a native UX or cross-platform framework.

[KaiserPro]

Kivy is old, so its improved more recently, but animation in HTML/JS is not power efficient.

Everything is GL accelerated, so the UI is snappy and fast.

[bbor]

Thanks for the reply! If touch handler delays are intentional then it seems like an advantage, not a weakness — who am I to disagree with UX experts employed by some of the top-paying tech companies or Mozilla? This is really a synecdoche of the overall situation, from my perspective: some really good devs want absolute control over every part of the stack, and to feel “close” to bare metal as they code, whereas the dummies like me appreciate that someone did a lot of the hard work for us.

In other words: how would that demo hold up if you asked them to recreate some popular react libraries, such as tables, graphs, and 3D simulations? When dealing with hard tasks (and network latency!) it seems like any platform-level delays would be quickly dwarfed by context-specific delays. And in the latter case, I’d rather have NPM than https://kivy.org/gallery.html !

PS did anyone else know NPM is now owned by Microsoft? We seriously need a revolution, or at the very least a figurative corporate guillotine. They own most of gaming, most of NLP/AI, most of dev tools, most of business/office computing, most of the OS market in general, most of… everything, it seems like. I’m just thrilled in hindsight that the windows phone failed!

[graemep]

" I have seen some mobile browser implementations that explicitly put large delays (hundreds of ms) into their touch handlers for example."

Why would they do that?

[c-hendricks]

I think it was something to do with dealing with double taps. Either way, the delay has been removed for about as long as that videos been up.

https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/191072/webkit

[c-hendricks]

This delay can be worked around by using the standard viewport meta tag, which any web app built for mobile will be using.