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I am very happy that I am allowed to participate in yet another Google Summer of Code in 2011. This will be my fourth consecutive and probably last GSoC – at least as a student. I am participating on behalf of the Kivy project for the second time now and my objective is to improve the integration of Kivy on Mac OS X. Let me explain what that means: In order for Kivy to function with its full set of features, which includes things like audio and video playback, window creation with OpenGL content, image display, spelling correction and more, we need to make use of some external software libraries that are dedicated to handle the respective tasks, such as video decoding, etc. Implementing a cross-platform video decoder for example is much work and beyond the scope of our project, which is why we use the work of other brilliant minds instead of reinventing the wheel. That said, there are a lot of different implementations for the kind of things we require. Since our goal is not to restrict the user to a certain set of those solutions, we abstract from those third party APIs and provide the necessary functionality through a common interface; both cross-platform and cross-API. This approach also enables us to more easily port Kivy to new platforms, such as Android, as we don’t have to modify the code that is using the abstractions, but just add a new implementation (which we refer to as a ‘provider’) for the new platform. Taking video as an example, we currently rely on gstreamer for the implementation. While gstreamer has proven to be a good choice on Linux (as it’s often included in Gnome based distributions anyway) it’s not an ideal choice from my point of view for other platforms like Mac OS X. This is because it adds additional packaging and maintenance overhead and also significantly increases the size of the Kivy distribution, as we have to compile and ship gstreamer with Kivy for the Mac (which is not easy anyway) because it doesn’t exist there by default. This is especially true because there is a native API to do the same things you’d use gstreamer for on the Mac. That API is always available on the Mac and using it would mean that we can still provide video playback support without shipping gstreamer. In fact, this is not only true for video, but for all of Kivy’s so-called ‘core providers’. Long story short, the goal of this GSoC is to use as many native Mac APIs (as is reasonable) instead of external libraries. Here is a list of Kivy’s core providers:

• Window
• OpenGL
• Image
• Text
• Audio
• Video
• Spelling
• Clipboard
• Camera

OpenGL already works and so does Spelling because I had already taken care of those previously. The first things I tackled during this GSoC were the window and image providers. Obviously you need a window to display the other things and have some feedback while developing, so this was a pretty obvious starting point. The original plan was to base the new window provider on Cocoa’s APIs directly, but while looking into that Mathieu pointed out that it might be preferable at the start to base it on the development version of SDL instead (which is also what pygame uses) as they already have this abstraction for every platform under the sun, so other platforms might benefit as well. Also, SDL is pretty easy to compile and package. So after some hacking, what do we have right now? There is a working SDL window provider. You can use it to open a Window and display OpenGL content. Still missing is handling of certain SDL events such as proper mouse/touch integration. Wile you can already draw a line with it, it’s not finished the way it should be yet. That is a TODO item. Next up was the image provider. Why? Simply because Kivy loads a default texture for use in its GL operations, so we figured instead of patching that out temporarily I might as well implement the image provider directly. So what we have right now is a working image provider based on CoreGraphics that should be able to handle all image formats that the CG APIs natively handle. There are only two things missing. Firstly it doesn’t seem to be handling alpha channels properly yet and secondly it currently reports a fake list of supported formats. These are TODO items. After finishing what I pointed out before, next up would be text and video providers. Starting tomorrow (May 30th) I will be in the US for a couple of days to visit the university where I’ll hopefully be doing my Master’s thesis. Unfortunately I had to sign a form that I will not engage in any GSoC related coding activities while I am in the US (you have to do that if you’re non-US based), so my next report will have to be a little delayed. This is what it currently looks like with the pictures example: The code is available here and right now very much work in progress.