[ANN] New Kivy-iOS toolchain.

[Mathieu Virbel]

Hi everyone,

I'm glad to announce the release of a new kivy-ios toolchain. This is mostly a complete rewrite of the previous toolchain in Python, with additionnal features such as:

- Supports iOS simulator (i386, x86_64)

- Supports ARM64 needed for iPhone 5s / 6, and release your app on the App store

- Recipe-based toolchain. It works the same as python-for-android, just said what recipe you want to build, and it will build all the dependencies as well

- Design with binary in mind: mean in the future, we'll be able to ship precompiled version of the toolchain, ready to use.

- Xcode dependencies management: the new Xcode project is a template (using cookiecutter), with empty libraries/frameworks by default. When you create a project, the toolchain will fill the appropriates sections with the needed Frameworks/libraries for the current compiled recipes. You can also later build new recipes and invoke the update command to update your Xcode project as well

- Fully based on latest SDL2. The previous version was using half/hybrid SDL 1.3 with custom patch to make it work. We cleaned everything.

- New ffpyplayer using ffmpeg, that allow Kivy to have Video provider as well.

This new toolchain is commited in master. See the documentation about it at:

    https://github.com/kivy/kivy-ios

The future is bright, and we hope this new toolchain approach can be used for the next reboot on python-for-android as well. The old toolchain has been saved in the "old-toolchain" git tag, if you really need it.

The future:

- supports openssl again

- re-add a lxml recipe

- blacklist/whitelist support

- ability to create xcode project with only the recipe you want (instead of all the compiled recipes)

- binary release

- nightly build / test release

- fix "buildozer ios"

I hope you'll like it :)

Enjoy,

Mathieu

[Eric Carlson]

Great!

Quick question: Does "The Future" mean the current new release? In particular, are the openssl fixes already in the new kivy ios toolchain?

Best, 

    -Eric

[Mathieu Virbel]

Unfortunately, the openssl is not yet integrated back to the new toolchain. The new is the current one, the future == roadmap.