You need to understand that this type of post really IS spam of the forums. Your troubles have a lot to do with the fact that you are learning how to program in Python. These types of posts pollute the forum with code that is not useful for solving Pythonista problems and degrades the ability for other users to search for answers to problems in the future. It is akin to grafitti since other users in the future may stumble across this stuff and use it.

You have already benefitted greatly by getting advice from users like JonB to "refactor" your code and eliminate the globals. If you would just listen to that advice and do that, you will likely figure out what is wrong with your program along the way.

The key thing is that this has nothing to do with Pythonista!!!! Take it to stackoverflow or some other forum that is geared toward answering questions about programming in Python. PLEASE!

I am going to mark this posting for moderation but don't take it personally. I can see that your are just trying to learn and I really appreciate that.

@Pythonistapro777 - you have chosen a user name that implies you are not a beginner and yet you are asking questions in a way that implies you are in fact a beginner not only in Pythonista, but Python and programming in general. You need to know that there are many highly skilled programmers involved in this forum who give a great deal of their time to help people at all levels. This is a precious resource and should not be squandered. The way you are asking for help is inappropriate and wasting their very valuable time.

You have been asked at least twice now to at least show that you have tried to figure out what the problem is yourself before asking for help. In the current case your are obviously (to me) having trouble using global variables and don't understand it. Please at least take the time to go learn something about global variables in Python and write some simple test code to verify that you understand it before posting a request for help again.

@omz - for the record - I personally consider this user's recent postings to be bordering on SPAM in these forums and would ask them to be treated as such if it continues.

There is a new term in application software development called gamification. It is the conversion of a normally boring workflow into a game. Programmers that can do this can earn some big bucks since it is not all that easy. You have to know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff. Read this article for a good perspective. This may be your future career path :-)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sungardas/2014/01/13/why-turning-work-into-a-game-is-on-the-rise/#28c550cc5569

Congrats on finally getting this project done. I just signed up to beta test and would like to offer help specifically with the template and any feature that directly speaks to users who wish to use Pythonista to write their own Apps for the AppStore.

From a feature perspective:

1. I would like to see the template kept in sync with the build so that developers would get bug fixes as soon as any other user. I would love to hear about why this is such a problem but can surmise that the template project is currently "hand built" or requires a great deal of manual work for some reason. Let's fix that once and for all.

2. I would like to hear about any progress that has been made in supporting integration with third party projects like OpenCV. I have noticed that other development environments support "plug-ins" that seem to be shared libraries and manage to make it through the App/AppStore process just fine. I have no idea yet how they are accomplishing this but I would be happy to research this and report back if we could make it a project to get this done for Pythonista.

I have been thinking a lot about the template and it purpose and future and believe that it is actually a product all by itself. It needs to have a defined purpose and a set of use cases and then offered in the AppStore for a fair price for what it delivers. For anyone using it to do professional level App development you should be able to charge a hefty price and look at paying someone to maintain it for you.

I am going to stop writing now. This is getting too off topic.

UPDATE: I have been syncing up with all the posts from the last 4 days and notice that the template was updated on GitHub at the same time as the 3.x beta - so part of my question may already be answered there. I won't post again until I actually install the new beta and download that template.

If you are currently in the beta running under TestFlight you may not see the 2.0 release in the AppStore updates tab. You can get it to show up as an update if you just navigate over to your purchased Apps, find Pythonista 1.5.x, and then hit the download button (cloud icon). Although this causes 1.5 to get downloaded your existing data gets preserved. You will then see the update to 2.0 in the usual updates section and can download and install the new release. So it is like doing a downgrade/upgrade process which is a bit scary but seems to be fine. Worked for me :-)

As @omz says - it is wise to do a backup just in case.

We have been discussing this in another thread (search for CoreMIDI). Getting CoreMIDI linked into Pythonista is required and then someone could take a shot at using ctypes to convert the simplecoremidi code to Python.

@omz says the following ... "I'm not currently linking against CoreMIDI – and there's another problem: MIDISourceCreate and MIDIDestinationCreate require that the app declares the 'audio' background mode, which is a build-time thing that you can't modify after the app is installed... While declaring this would actually be useful for other things, I'm not sure if I could get the app through review with background audio enabled because it could be abused for all sorts of things (e.g. running in the background forever while looping a silent track...). I don't know, maybe I'll have to integrate a music player to have an official reason."

All of my applications would require reliable background processing anyway, so I hope omz decides to take the plunge and see if he can get past app review with it. My main application for it would be to translate MIDI data in the background as it moves from one device to another and playing MIDI data to synths that I have installed. All of this would require the script to be running in the background and not getting cancelled all the time. There are already LOTs of music apps out there to do this but none of them are programmable.

I have some questions about the cb implementation. I have noticed that there is no support for Descriptors or Advertisement info.

Descriptors of characteristics would be nice if they are actually implemented by the BLE device manufactures. It would make it possible to write a nice generic BLE browser app.

Advertisement data is probably more important since this seems to be the way you get access to the signal strength of the remote device. It can also be the main way that all of the data a device produces is transmitted. This is the way that beacons are suppose to work. There is no connection ever made since all the data comes across as part of the advertisement.

Also, looking at the apple sdk, I notice that they have both a central manager and peripheral manager while your implementation rolls them into one. This keeps things simple, but it also makes managing multiple peripherals difficult.

The issue of persistence is an additional concern. I have read that the design of BLE encourages the persistence of service and characteristic uuids after they are discovered so that you don't need to rescan for them every time your app runs. The apple sdk seems to have support for this with calls you can make to do scans for connected peripherals or for specific services.

Is Apple still messing around with all this and changing their APIs a lot? In reading through the online docs, I keep seeing lots of crossed out functions and new ones so it looks kinda rough. I can't even find a mention of how MIDI is suppose to be implemented despite the fact it suppose to already be part of ios8.

Same application as SplotlightKid. I found this project that could make it reasonably doable.

https://github.com/sixohsix/simplecoremidi

Only 256 lines of C code to wrap the MIDI connect read write and reset. Should allow you to talk to synths running on the device as well as via wired and now Bluetooth devices.

The use of OpenCV has been one of the most requested features for awhile. Directly integrating a third partly library into Pythonista is a huge amount of work so @omz has had to keep it on the request list in order to concentrate on other priorities such as getting Python3 done.

A lot has been done with the ability to load and then access a library of code (a framework) from within Pythonista using the objc_util module. You can load and access most of the Apple frameworks now except that you are still limited by Pythonista permissions (plist).

@omz has stated that he learned some new things that have allowed him to run both Python2 and Python3 as shared libraries of code within the same App. I am hoping that this means that something like OpenCV could also now be tackled as a shared library now. There are others in the forum that have attempted to do this in the past that may know more and weigh in on this. My sense is that it might now be possible to do it for yourself using the current XCode template with the ability to release it to others who own the Pythonista App as a longer term possibility.

I think your idea for a Sudoku app could make this the "hello world" example of how to do this since it is a game. The UI alone shows how to implement an interactive grid if tiles and has been done many times already in Pythonista. Filling in the grid using OCR would be a killer demo IMHO.

It is not clear to me if you are just trying to use an image as a data container, trying to create a kind of barcode, or are trying to add hidden data into and image. In any case many of the issues your are thinking about are covered in the area of imaging technology called Stegonography. This is the embedding of data into an image and its retrieval from the image after it has gone through various transformations including lossy compression. Let's just say - it is heavily researched and many companies have lived and died implementing various techniques. The most famous one is Digimarc. There are also numerous open source "Stego" projects out there that are worth exploring.

I was never clear on what was going on but I believe that @omz could enable it with the plist change for just the beta but then remove it after the beta. I would argue that beta testers have a stronger need for the ability since we are moving between devices a lot.

@ccc - you may be right but at least we can agree that this is just a decision that Apple can make now as part of the deployment process through the App store. By opening up the discussion again - I was hoping that @omz could share what he has learned recently that may change the picture. I think that @omz has formally sanctioned using PythonistaKit framework outside of the template indicates he is thinking of providing it as its own 3rd party shared library at some point. Maybe soon!

The use of OpenCV has been one of the most requested features for awhile. Directly integrating a third partly library into Pythonista is a huge amount of work so @omz has had to keep it on the request list in order to concentrate on other priorities such as getting Python3 done.

A lot has been done with the ability to load and then access a library of code (a framework) from within Pythonista using the objc_util module. You can load and access most of the Apple frameworks now except that you are still limited by Pythonista permissions (plist).

@omz has stated that he learned some new things that have allowed him to run both Python2 and Python3 as shared libraries of code within the same App. I am hoping that this means that something like OpenCV could also now be tackled as a shared library now. There are others in the forum that have attempted to do this in the past that may know more and weigh in on this. My sense is that it might now be possible to do it for yourself using the current XCode template with the ability to release it to others who own the Pythonista App as a longer term possibility.

I think your idea for a Sudoku app could make this the "hello world" example of how to do this since it is a game. The UI alone shows how to implement an interactive grid if tiles and has been done many times already in Pythonista. Filling in the grid using OCR would be a killer demo IMHO.

Example Music Stats.py does not run. Throws an Attribute Error on the NSBundle call. Can be fixed by changing

NSBundle.bundleWithPath('/System/Library/Frameworks/MediaPlayer.framework').load()

to

ObjCClass('NSBundle').bundleWithPath_('/System/Library/Frameworks/MediaPlayer.framework').load()

It is not clear to me if you are just trying to use an image as a data container, trying to create a kind of barcode, or are trying to add hidden data into and image. In any case many of the issues your are thinking about are covered in the area of imaging technology called Stegonography. This is the embedding of data into an image and its retrieval from the image after it has gone through various transformations including lossy compression. Let's just say - it is heavily researched and many companies have lived and died implementing various techniques. The most famous one is Digimarc. There are also numerous open source "Stego" projects out there that are worth exploring.

There is a new term in application software development called gamification. It is the conversion of a normally boring workflow into a game. Programmers that can do this can earn some big bucks since it is not all that easy. You have to know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff. Read this article for a good perspective. This may be your future career path :-)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sungardas/2014/01/13/why-turning-work-into-a-game-is-on-the-rise/#28c550cc5569

@Webmaster4o - I certainly understand your fears about getting Pythonista yanked from the AppStore because an end user figured out how to work around the rules with it. I guess I have been assuming that this would be handled by the normal review process and such Apps would not make it through but that may not be true.

I have to point out that this thread is suppose to be about support for a feature that @omz does not want to allow as a a "standard" feature for Pythonista. He has explained his thinking about this and it makes perfect sense. Having a way for the customer to do it anyway would have a lot a value because the alternative is to just walk away from Pythonista entirely and explore other options.

As we get back on topic - I would like to point out that this thread is the first time I think I have seen @omz discuss his target customer as being a game developer. I knew he was very supportive of using it for game development but thought that it was primarily a workflow automation tool and designed the code base to be leveragable for other apps - thus we have Editorial. Does this mean @omz has a game in mind that he has been working on for years but it is not ready to reveal yet?

@Tizzy - sounds like we are on the same page in terms of how the template/SDK might be presented to new users. I beginning to think it should be provided with a very simple editor and file browser written with the help of the objc_util module as its "hello world" sample script. Hey - maybe bundle it with Stash and a new notepad.py script text editor.

@Webmaster40 - I think that using this as a way to get functionality that @omz has already implemented but is prevented from deploying is sorely needed. The fact that it can only be used for personal use and may not be able to go to the App Store is an interesting way to sidestep the rules but stay within the spirit of the rules.

One other thing to consider is that this may open the door to attracting the "enterprise" customers. Instead of deploying apps through the App Store they deploy things completely differently and they can decide what is and is not allowed in their own environments. This is controlled by each organizations IT departments. This market could be much much larger then the consumer market and you can charge a whole lot more for a product and also charge for support. I have been thinking recently that @omz should explore alternatives to TestFlight as a way to offer feature to user that Apple would normally disallow. Using TestFlight seems to give him some latitude already in what he can do during beta testing but some of the alternatives seem to give even more latitude. Here is an good link with some info on this: https://www.playtestcloud.com/blog/testflight-alternatives-ios-android

Just a dumb question ... Couldn't this issue be solved in the template/SDK. Is it possible muck around with plist settings and get it that way? I was wondering about this in general anyway and the answer could be the same for many other things users would like to do but are denied by Apple for various reasons - like true background processing, etc. etc,

This thread is getting really long so I may just start another about the new template you posted to github. I am coming at this with virtually no knowledge of XCode development so my feedback should be taken in that context. At this point I have simply setup for XCode development on a squeaky clean Mac Mini. I read the Reame on the Github site but it had nothing about how to "install" the template. I spent a few days researching this and learned that it depends on a number of factors. So my feedback for now would be to add some text to the Readme to discuss this. I think the Readme should state the 3 or 4 ways to download the package and install it and why you would pick each of the methods. Something along these lines ...

1. Checkout the distribution using XCode source code control and recommend a destination location and then how to do a build using the stock XCode dev environment (not the command line) - then run in the simulator and then deploy to your device.

2. Download the distribution as a ZIP file, unpack it and then move the pieces into their "correct" locations. This one would probably best be done using the command line only.

3. Install the distribution using CocoPod? I have no experience with this yet and don't know what is involved. However - this seems to be one of the most modern methods for keeping the dependencies between all the parts of your App under control and easy to maintain.

4. Other? Maybe document the tools you are specifically using in your development environment as it might be illuminating.

New users of the template may also be wondering what the supplied process does anywhere the result end up. Does it produce universal binaries or only ones targeting IOS. Mac OSX support? etc. I am just looking at this as if this is a SDK offering and that Pythonista is the demo app for this SDK. You have mentioned that at least one developer has taken the framework out of your distribution and put it into another project so this seems appropriate.