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Comment by melle | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Kivy for a few months now. From my experience it's a great language/platform to develop proof of concepts and prototypes.

Main drawbacks: - Community size - It's missing some general styling capabilities

Because everything is in Python, it's really easy to get started. Give it a go!

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Have you visited their irc chan on freenode (#kivy)? The people who created Kivy are there and very responsive - I remember one of them answering me on the 25th of December. Granted the community is small but I found the people there very lovely to interact.

Unfortunately I have other experiences, mainly not getting any response at all on the irc chan.

Will try again though, I should probably also be more responsive myself to questions of others.

Might depend where you are based and when you go on IRC. I know that the Kivy team is based in Europe and tend to be online during working hours there. If you're based in the West coast for example you might log in only when they are all away - OK, if the community was a bigger that issue would be solved.

Compared with Qt and Tk for Python, where you have to manually code layouts (unless you use some layout generation tools, but they're all pretty iffy), how easy is it to design and code a form/screen/input/etc in Kivy?

I'd say it's really easy to create a form layout using the kv-language (which is yaml based and hooks into Python classes)

If you want to use somethimg else than the default theme however, you might need to do some extra work. As someone else commented, there is a material design theme, haven't used that myself though.

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