This week, was full of a non trivial number of learnings surrounding how to create an MVP app in Python… that can be later deployed / packed into an Xcode project i.e. iOS app.

While going through the process of developing my final Capstone project (a satellite tracking app), I asked an iOS engineer if he felt learning Swift & using ARKit to develop this MVP app within 3 months was the best way to go – humbly caveating I have never used Swift before, acknowledging that learning curve would be huge. The engineer shared in his opinion, it would be a better learning experience to use Python and a framework that converts a Python project to Swift.

This sent me down a research path wherein I reviewed Python to Xcode framework options, followed tutorials and down selected Kivy, an Open source Python framework for rapid app development. My goal this week was to validate a Python framework + iOS export option would work for a general purpose iOS app before spending time adding custom features pulling in satellite uplink and downlink information, IMU, and accelerometer etc data.

In conclusion, I spent many hours just getting familiar with the Kivy framework, becoming familiar with the creation & deployment of Python virtual environments for use with Kivy projects, and creating an MVP basic Kivy app (calculator to test basic functionality using the Kivy syntax + Python).

As of this moment I’m blocked on rsync errors preventing my Kivy Python project (which works natively) to work as an Xcodeproj. I debugged numerous openGLES vs Metal & MobileCoreServices framework errors, but am continuing to chip away at the former.

As goes the saying, ” 110 bugs in the code.. take one down, patch it up, 119 bugs in the code. =)”

Onwards and upwards!