Rob G's Maya Python book is finally out

I see Rob Galanakis's new book is finally available for realz on Amazon.

I've added a few new books to the Techart bookstore page too!

Pythonistas need Pythonista!

If you consider yourself a Pythonista, you've probably been frustrated by the difficulty involved in getting to work in Python on iOS devices.  I just stumbled upon a really cool answer to your prayers in the form of Pythonista. It's not brand new - it looks like it came out last year - but I just found out about it and flipped my proverbial wig.

Pythonista is a sandboxed Python 2.7 development environment for iOS.  It borrows a page from the playbook of earlier sandboxes like Codea. and manages to skirt Apple's rules for what you can do on the device while still allowing plenty of power.  It includes a script editor (a pretty slick one for iOS, by the way) ,an interactive environment, and a bunch of libraries to make development really useful.  Among the 'batteries' included are heavy hitters like pil, numpy and matplotlib, along with a few cool little things like a text-to-speech module and tools for dealing with the iOS console.

The most impressive inclusions are the scene and ui modules: custom modules devoted to iOS drawing and UI.  Ironically, it's easier to develop a GUI application on your iPad using Pythonista than it is to do it on a desktop machine - the app even comes with a UI builder tool similar to QT's interface builder (not nearly as deep or complex, of course, but iOS UI is less complex than desktop). You can read multiple touches.  You can even do hardware accelerate drawing - nice for things like a finger-sketching program.  Since Pythonista includes pil, you can even do stuff like image processing:

Pythonista's main limitation is that it's not possible to add external modules to the library in the usual ways: setuptools and pip aren't available.  You can manually install pure-python modules by copy-paste-save, and there are few installation tools floating around on the web such as pipista and Pypi.  (As an aside: here's a handy collection of Pythonista snippets and links).  Modules with binary dependencies -- such as the perforce api -- are off-limits; I'm not sure it it would be possible to use .pyd's that were properly compiled for iOS or if the security sandbox won't allow arbitrary binary code at all.

All in all, it's pretty cool stuff for any Pythonerd.  My big project right now is a touch based inteface on the iPad to control a BrickPi Mindstorms robot, but at some point I think an asset-database / issue tracker client on the iPad would be a handy tool for our production team .  Pretty cool for $6.99!

Pipeline book out in Japan (!)

I just heard that the Production Pipeline book is out in Japan as of today. Wowsers!

This is actually my second time being published in Japan. I also contributed a chapter to 97 Things Every Game Creator Should Know.  But still. Japan. I mean...  

PS:  The books is still up for sale on Amazon: And it's also on the Tech Art Bookstore page.

Handy link: Python string format cookbook

If you're like me and addicted to using the old-school percent-symbol based string format, the newer bracket-based formatting is probably a bit mysterious. The python docs certainly don't help, they seem to be written for C programmers on meth (a help document entitled 'string format specification mini language' does not scream 'usability' to me, at any rate).

So, many props to Marcus Kazmierczak for his handy Python String Formatting Cookbook page. It's already saved me a ton of profanity. Here's to elevating the discourse of the internet!

Save The Environment 2: I am the .Egg Man

In my last, bumper-sticker-laden post I offered to share a little bit about the way I pack up my tools for users.  This time I'll try to actually describe the process.

After a all the buildup, I wish I could make this sound more high tech and impressive. Basically, I just pack up what I have and send it all out to my users in a big ol' zip file.  The zip ends up on their Maya's PYTHONPATH, and gives them exactly the same stuff I had when I created the zip.  That's kind of it.  It's basically a simplified version of a python egg; however since I'm distributing an entire ecosystem in one shot I've opted to do the packaging myself instead of relying on setuptools and all of its complex dependency management arrangements.

Simple as it is, this system has saved me a huge amount of time and energy over the last few years. It's been a long time since I've had to worry about a mysterious import failure or the wrong version of a module.  Simplicity and robustness are very important, especially in the foundation of a pipeline. Of course, they don't always make for the most engaging blog posts  But I'll do what I can, even if it means resorting to some pretty lame egg puns.