[ANN] Kivy 1.6.0 released

[Mathieu Virbel]

Hi everyone,

We are pleased to announce Kivy 1.6.0.

Kivy is a full featured framework for creating novel and performant
user interfaces, such as multitouch applications, under the LGPL 3
license. The framework works on Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS.
All downloads are available on the website:

http://kivy.org

Here is some features we want to highlight:

- Custom vertex format / initial 3d support: previously, our
internals graphics instructions was using a fixed vertex format,
with 2d position and 2d texture position: [x, y, u, v]. Now, we
can build custom vertex format such as 3d position, texture
position and normals.
This is a step to get a 3d pipeline. But this is not easy to use
it as an user, because you also need to create a new
RenderContext, and wrote your own vertex and fragment Shaders. We
are working on that. Check the examples/3Drendering for the
monkey, in addition to a OBJ loader.

- Support for paletted textures and PVRTC: if you want to optimize
the GPU memory consuption and reduce loading time, using paletted
texture or compressed textures is a good way. Paletted texture
support is only working on GLES devices. PVRTC support works on
any devices with PowerVR ship.
In addition, a new tool named "texturecompress.py" has been added
in kivy/tools, for compressing images into a compressed texture
format in a new .tex file. More information to come in a seperate
announcement.

- Text rendering improvement: we now support "justify" aligmement in
our core labels and labels widgets. Also, TextInput support a
"placeholder", useful to display some help when no text is
entered.


Note: PPA and Android applications will be updated later during the
week.


Changelog - 1.6.0
=================

Core
----

- [#1001] Add justify support for text alignment
- [#828] Fixed descriptor error in EventDispatcher.getattr
- [#886] Fixes memory leak when log_enable = 0 in config
- [#895] Fixes network image reloading
- [#902] Fixes Python strings for 2.6
- [#920] Fixes ImageIO crash if image cannot be loaded
- [#985] Fixes zip loader to skip errors
- Add support for GIF transparency in PIL
- Core logs are now reduced, and traceback is available only in
trace
- Enhance Clock to accept only callable() in schedule methods
- EventDispatcher can be weak-referenced
- Fixes image reloading when Window is resized on OSX
- Fixes Window fullscreen, even when the config is "auto"
- Fixes Window.screenshot for rotated window
- Improve Kv: avoid to parse on_* expression, just exec them.
- New MotionEvent.is_mouse_scrolling
- Rework Loader internals, limit to 2 threads workers and images
upload per frames

Graphics
--------

- [#913] Fixes Line.ellipse/circle instructions
- Add Texture support for paletted texture
- Add Texture support for PVRTC (iOS and PowerVR GPU only)
- Enhanced vertex format to allow custom format.
- Fixes crash on the Adreno 200 GPU / Android - force POT texture
- Reworked graphics vertex instructions to support custom format as
well

Widgets
-------

- [#863] Improve ListView usage with Kv language
- [#865] New Bubble.limit_to for limiting the bubble position
- [#868] Fixes Slider positioning when padding is used
- [#883] Fixes empty markup rendering
- [#916] Fixes cursor positionning in CodeInput
- [#921] Fixes Scrollview scrolling with mousewheel if it's disabled
- [#928] Image log an error when an image cannot be loaded
- [#937] Fixes BoxLayout.pos_hint for children
- [#940] Enhance TextInput bubble for long-press and readonly
- [#941] Fixes ProgressBar value boundaries
- [#954] Fixes GridLayout children size_hint
- [#959] Add ListAdapter.data property to allow changing the data
- [#961] Fixes ScreenManager green color to black in
ShaderTransition
- [#966] New TextInput placeholder
- [#989] Fixes Carousel positioning and reduce calculations
- Add mousewheel support on Slider
- Enhance TabbedPanel to allow no default tab
- Fixes for TextInput rendering glitch
- Fixes RelativeLayout.clear_widgets()
- Fixes ScrollView gesture ability on X when scrollview is Y only
(and the inverse)
- Fixes TextInput wrapping
- New (Async)Image.nocache no prevent caching (data, texture)
- New Screen events: on_pre_enter/enter/pre_leave/leave
- New ScreenManager.has_screen() method

Others
------

- Fixes inspector crash
- iOS: Updated SDL, launch images are now supported
- New 3D rendering example with lightning and a monkey
- Tons of fixes on Documentation !


A big thanks to Christoph Pittracher, Eowyn, Eric Man, Gabriel
Pettier, Ian Foote, Injo Luuvish Hwang, Jeff Pittman, Jeroen Doggen,
Mathieu Virbel, Oscar Ramirez, paulocheque, Petr Vanek, qua-non, Rene
Horn, Richard Jones, Rio Kierkels, Ryan Pessa, shayne, smishlayev,
tangofoxtrotmike, Thomas Hansen, Thomas-Karl Pietrowski, Tobias Macey,
Tyler Conrad and Zen-CODE for this release!

--
Mathieu
http://kivy.org/#aboutus

[Mathieu Virbel]

As requested by some users for previous release, all the Android
applications have been updated, and published on Google Play. And all
the APK are uploaded on Google code as well.
This includes:
- Kivy launcher
- Kivy showcase demo
- Kivy pictures demo
- Kivy touchtracer demo

You can download them at: http://code.google.com/p/kivy/downloads/list

Enjoy,

Mathieu

2013/3/10 Mathieu Virbel <m...@kivy.org>:

[Thomas Pietrowski]

Great! PPA, OBS ad COBS will be updated soon. All builds are in progress at the moment. Hope there will be no problems.

Happy hacking!

[Thomas Pietrowski]

Very important message to all who are using our PPA on Ubuntu:

Currently there is a problem with another software, called Cython, which is used to generate C/C++ code, which is later on compiled by a compiler.

But as 1.6.0 was released, Cython got corrupted and will make Kivy crash anytime it is imported into your code.

We are working on that problem and hope we get it fixed as soon as possible, while getting in contact with the Cython developers to find a solution for this problem.

If you are interested to help out in testing and being up-to-date in this fixing process, just take a look at https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/1004 and feel free to join the conversation.

It also includes a quick instruction to rebuild the source package on your computer. Resulting *.deb-packages can be installed as usual and should work as an older Cython is installed on your system, than the latest which is corrupting our builds at the moment.

[ https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/1004#issuecomment-14988436 ]

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,

Thomas-Karl Pietrowski