Android soon to be able to distribute Python apps as .APKs | Hacker News Reader

Android soon to be able to distribute Python apps as .APKs

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63 pointsiamelgringo19 comments

ASE is awesome, but it doesn't expose the full android API to python scripts. http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/ApiReference is what you get currently, though this list seems to be growing pretty quickly.

Google Apps Scripts is also awesome!

http://www.google.com/google-d-s/scripts/scripts.html

Project #6 for the Ruby Summer of Code is getting JRuby apps on Android to work:

http://rubysoc.org/projects

You can do some sick stuff right now: Ruboto On Acid

http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/1419

I've been really happy ever since I installed Python on my Droid. It's really fun to show off how you can access text-to-speech with droid.speak().

I'm not sure I buy it will be useful for development without a custom VM, but I have the full power of a 500 mhz (ish) processor wherever I am.

Anyone know how scripted apps affect battery life?

My first thought as well. Battery life on my Incredible is poor at best as it is. I don't want to pony up for an oversize battery and wreck the profile, I need it to fit in a case/holster/mount/etc.

How fast does battery technology progress? I've replaced a few batteries in iPods and Nintendo DS's and I'm fairly certain they were rated much higher than the stock ones, while being surprisingly cheap.

Does it go fast enough to make a material difference between choosing a phone with or without user accessible batteries and purchasing a newer battery 6 or 12 months later?

Historically, battery tech progress has been depressingly slow. Slow enough to be the primary limiting factor for a lot of technologies. The vast majority of progress has been in reducing power consumption rather than increasing power storage.

Interesting, I've never thought about replacing a phone battery with a higher-end model (can you tell I have an iPhone?) I'm curious as to the actual battery life gains one would see and the effect on weight , etc.

I must have benchmarks!

From what I've seen extended life batteries for phones tend to be 100-200mAh larger than stock batteries. So I think that would work out to a ~10% improvement for most phones. It really depends on the capacity of the OEM battery. I remember seeing a 2000mAh+ battery for the EVO which would be nearly a 25% improvement over the stock battery.

Just to provide a counterpoint: N900/Maemo has had the ability to have apps distributed in an arbitrary language since launch, and Nokia seems to especially like Python, sponsoring the developement of Qt bindings for it etc.

Now the important question, will it hurt frame rate if games are developed using Python instead of Java for android?

Do you have some reason to believe that Google seriously hosed the Java implementation on Android or these guys have massively increased the efficiency of the Python implementation? Otherwise, it seems the answer would have to be yes.. the same algorithm will usually perform (much) worse in Python than in Java.

Note I don't mean to slam Python here.. just being practical. Python's my primary language. Development efficiency usually trumps execution inefficiency.

a python interface to a lower level rendering library could mitigate most of that effect.

otoh, serious game writing is pretty hardcore tech, cutting-edge game devs probably won't jump into python right away.

Python is going to chug even on relatively simple action games. I did write some 2D stuff in Pygame/SDL and Pygame/OpenGL back in the early-mid 2000s that could do 30FPS, but to do it was akin to writing in BASIC on an 8-bit; you had to micro-optimize in a fairly brutal way, one which obscured Python's powers. Things like rendering a tilemap could get huge speed boosts simply by avoiding nested loops in favor of a cache. Even using OpenGL wasn't really enough to secure a comfortable margin of performance.

If I did it again I would have an easier time because I missed a few critical constructs back then(most notably, the array package). It still wouldn't be pretty, especially not on a phone.

No bother.. Most cutting edge game devs wouldn't jump into Android right away either.

I hope this stuff is executing on top of Dalvik and not via the NDK.

Noob here: What about the GUI? How it will be created?

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