@cook
Yes, I know it can be done with the objc_utils, and that's what I'll be using. It just seems like the sort of thing that would be useful in a standard library, and as the speech library already sets up all the listeners etc to queue up multiple lines, it feels slightly like reinventing the wheel to write my own library.

Ooooh... neat.

I don't think I'll bother trying to implement the connection management at this stage -- it'll be a very early-stage prototype, and only I'll be using it, so I can do that manually.

Many thanks!

I'd love to see an update to the speech module that gives me access to multiple voices by name.
I'm a French teacher and the voices in iOS are actually not bad for listening practice, and to date I've stuck with two voices: the French male one and the Canadian female one. But in theory I've got the two Siri voices available as well, so that should be two men and two women that I could have in a conversation.

I've found a tutorial on switching the voices using Swift (http://www.ikiapps.com/tips/2015/12/30/setting-voice-for-tts-in-ios.html), so I'm going to try and wrap that in myself. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested (There are 11 different English voices, for instance, which is probably enough for a small game.)

@ipaulo My memory's a bit sketchy about how Pythonista's GUI library works, but I tend to use PySimpleGUI, because it's not just cross-platform, it's cross-back-end.

I think I've tended to use the Qt version, but the WxPython thing seems familiar too...

(I love the idea of sitting on a beach coding, but even if it had the battery life for it, my laptop's staying off the beach. I've still go a first-gen iPad mini, which I consider practically disposable at this point!!!)

Well, I'm teaching an introductory course and need to teach a "lowest common denominator" version that will work for various different courses with different needs.
Between the various IDEs and Python installs, the lowest I've found is WinPython 3.7, and the only potentially significant difference between that and 3.6 for a beginner's level course is the ordering of dictionary keys.

"For Pythonista users, given that a lot of the power of Pythonista is in its access to iPhone-native functionality, it is very unlikely that an existing significant piece of code would run anywhere else."
The reason I never became a heavy Pythonista user myself was the lack of portability. I would have done a lot more dev work on the iPad if I wasn't damning myself to forking stuff.

(Did have a wee nosey at Toga, as I see Pyto does that, but it's more complicated than I want for a course where GUI dev is a side-effect of the content, not the main goal. Also, there seem to be serious dependency problems installing Toga on Windows when it comes to Python versions, and that's a hell of lot of discouraging boilerplate for absolute newbies...)

Hi,

I teach programming and I'm now using PySimpleGUI in my courses. The university only officially supports CPython on desktop and Anaconda/Jupyter; however, I'd be happy for students to use an iPad if they've got one (and a keyboard) but only if they can use the right libraries!!

If you're not familiar with PySimpleGUI, it's a fairly basic but robust cross-platform standard that is implemented as a wrapper for all the main Python GUI libraries -- TkInter, Qt, WxWidgets, Remi (web browser as GUI). You'll clearly get different visual results on each, but the functionality will be almost identical on each.

To me, a Pythonista wrapper (PySimpleGUIPythonista or similar) would make perfect sense, as it would give us a way of making cross-platform GUIs on our iPads and would mean a lot more Python apps would work on Pythonista.

@struct_engineer Ole's Twitter account has been silent for just over a year.

It's a shame Pythonista's falling by the wayside -- it's one of my favourite IDEs on any system for how clean, clear and focused it is.

I'd always hoped he'd follow up by repurposing the UI for website work.

I teach Python and I'd love to recommend Pythonista to my iPad-owning students, but as new Python features slowly work their way into the syllabus, I'm finding it harder to do so...

Ooooh... neat.

I don't think I'll bother trying to implement the connection management at this stage -- it'll be a very early-stage prototype, and only I'll be using it, so I can do that manually.

Many thanks!

Apple is very precious about background services, and there was a point a few years ago where they cracked down heavily on app developers using background processing for convenience rather than strict need.

In order to get through app approval, you have to have a very strong case for allowing background operation, and I'd be very surprised if Pythonista would have got through approval with an open API for background tasks that would basically allow anyone to do anything they feel like...

I'm pretty certain the answer is "no" (because otherwise I'd have found something when I tried searching the documentation) but is it possible to get Pythonista to send a different picture to a connected HDMI or AirPlay screen than is shown on the iPad's own screen.

I'm looking to prototype an educational app where the teacher has a control surface on the iPad which controls what is displayed on the classroom projector or interactive whiteboard.

(If Pythonista can't do it natively, I'll set up a Raspberry Pi as the classroom screen controller and write a simple control interface in Python to send HTTP requests to the Pi....)

@abcabc
The only wrinkle with your approach is that it would be too easy to work away on Pythonista and build up a working UI, only to forget which methods were available in the cross-platform version.

The way I would solve this is by renaming the package (eg pythonistaui, and having two versions -- a Pythonista one and a Kivy one. The job of the Pythonista package would be to simply throw an error any time you tried to use something that isn't implemented in the Kivy version.

In its simplest version, it would just be a list of imports, but that wouldn't deal with classes that didn't have all methods fully implemented -- in that case you'd have to build subclasses and override unimplemented methods to throw exceptions.

If you are considering developing such a wrapper, I think the Pythonista version could probably be generated automatically with a bit of clever programming -- write a script that takes the ui spec from Pythonista, checks each function, class and method to see if it's available in your Kivy wrapper, and builds up the Pythonista wrapper from there.