Design applications with convergence in mind

Developing an application with convergence in mind will be a new space in linux application development. The upcoming Librem5 from Purism allows application developers to run standard applications in a new form factor.

They develop a companion library libhandy with Gtk widgets derived from standard Gtk to accomplish a convergence between desktop and smartphone usage without re-developing everything from scratch. This is really handy (pun intended) because most probably you just have to use a different container for most things. For example you used a GtkBox for a static sidebar in your application then you can use HdyLeaflet now which acts similar but offers in small form factors a different behaviour.

To design an application from the scratch its most probably best to think first about the small form factor and try later to fit a good desktop usage. I tried this with a simple hacker news reader application and my design looked like that:

This worked very well and i have a good understanding about the UX now. The smartphone usage is already implemented and next i want to make the desktop usage better.

I hope you liked my development logbook. I want to keep up with the development of this application and write from time to time a post about the current status.