What this book covers

Chapter 1, Building a Clock App provides a gentle introduction to writing applications with Kivy. It covers the Kivy language, layouts, widgets and timers. By the end of the chapter we build a simple Clock app, similar to the one found in your cellphone.

Chapter 2, Building a Paint App is a further exploration of the Kivy framework's components and functionality. The resulting Paint app showcases the customization of built-in widgets, drawing arbitrary shapes on canvas and handling multi-touch events.

Chapter 3, Sound Recorder for Android serves as an example of writing a Kivy-based Android app. It shows how to use the Pyjnius interoperability layer to load Java classes into Python, which enables us to mix Android API calls with a Kivy-based user interface.

Chapter 4, Kivy Networking is a hands-on guide to building a network application from the ground up. In covers a number of topics, from creating a simple protocol to writing server and client software in Python, and culminates with the Kivy Chat application.

Chapter 5, Making a Remote Desktop App exemplifies another way of writing client-server apps. This chapter's program is based on the HTTP protocol—the one that powers the Internet. We develop a command-line HTTP server first, and then build the Remote Desktop client app with Kivy.

Chapter 6, Making the 2048 Game walks you through building a playable replica of the 2048 game. We demonstrate more complex Kivy functionality, such as creating custom widgets, using Kivy properties for data binding, and processing touch screen gestures.

Chapter 7, Writing a Flappy Bird Clone introduces another Kivy-based game, this time it's an arcade game similar to the well-known Flappy Bird title. Over the course of this chapter we discuss the use of texture coordinates and sounds effects, implement arcade physics and collision detection.

Chapter 8, Introducing Shaders demonstrates the use of GLSL shaders in the context of a Kivy application. In this tutorial you will learn about OpenGL primitives such as indices and vertices, and then write incredibly fast low-level code that runs directly on the GPU.

Chapter 9, Making a Shoot-Em-Up Game continues where the previous chapter left off: we use the knowledge of GLSL in order to build a side-scrolling shooter. A reusable particle system class is developed along the way. This project concludes the series and capitalizes on many techniques that were explained throughout the book, such as collision detection, touch screen controls, sound effects and so on.

Appendix, The Python Ecosystem, gives you more on Python libraries and tools.