Kivy Plyer Updates

This week I looked into a pending facade’s implementation on Mac and worked on some new ones as well. In other news, we have a functional #plyer channel on Freenode. It is not very active at the moment but is fully equipped with all the basic amenities (:D), ie. logging and a google-group to contact the folks offline. The idea behind making a separate channel was to reduce the noise on the main channel and also allow the relevant people to focus on project specific updates here.

We have had a camera facade in the queue for quite some time now. We wanted to model something on the lines of what is available on Android OS. It should provide a simple API to  capture a picture from the default camera on the platform. We had tried two different unsatisfactory approaches previously and were on the lookout for a lighter (without many dependencies) method to get it working. I am of the view that we could do with tools in the public-domain like ImageSnap, for each platform. This is in line with the Plyer’s philosophy of trying not to re-invent the wheel and use external libraries wherever possible. I have created a pull request to get feedback on this approach and I am waiting to hear back on this from the community.

The other new facade that worked on is called “Play Sound”. As its name, it would be used to play a short clip of an audio file on command. It also relies on existing standard libraries and tools. I have made use of the Sound Pool API on android, NSSound on MacOS, WinSound on Windows and on Linux, I launch a command line player (play or aplay) for now. I may update that in future if I can find a better method to achieve that. Here’s a link to the PR.

I think slowly and steadily I have been reaching my mid-term goals and have been checking off items in my easy list. I think now would be a good time to gather some feedback on the PRs I have proposed till now. Some suggestions on them would help fix any issues with them and continue with new facades.

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