Menpowidgets has been designed for academic use. The project changes quickly as determined by our research, and this should be kept in mind at all times.
Here in the Menpo team, we are firm believers in making installation as simple as possible. Unfortunately, we are a complex project that relies on satisfying a number of complex 3rd party library dependencies. The default Python packing environment does not make this an easy task. Therefore, we evangelise the use of the conda ecosystem, provided by Anaconda. In order to make things as simple as possible, we suggest that you use conda too! To try and persuade you, go to the Menpo website to find installation instructions for all major platforms.