Pinephone app development

[vinnie]

I am a hobbyist programmer and this topic interests me as well.
I find that being able to make applications for your phone is very interesting, also because often an application must be less complex than what you would expect from its computer counterpart.
I program in Python, so the most interesting alternatives for me are those that support this language.
Godot seems to me an interesting thing considering its features, but I'd like to see how small you can keep the binary size for applications that should be small (like an address book).
Then i read some enthusiastic articles about kirigami (that however depending on qt probably it ask for a lot of dependencies).
Another interesting project is beeware (that is always cross-platform but produces native code).
I tried pysimplegui some time ago and maybe it can be a good idea, but i think the interfaces would be less responsive.
Out of this, I always think that if you can separate the operating code from the graphic, there is always the possibility to create a new interface with another library in any time.

[mouffa]

the development especially on mobile devices is quite a complicated matter, that is after you assess what hardware resources you need to deploy you have to choose a development platform that works smoothly and energy efficiently with those resources and the OS, you need the most efficient libraries etc, sometimes you may need to mix different things and dive into a very low level of hardware programming, it should always be considered on a per case basis

[vinnie]

Here, this is my test with pysimplegui (basically python + tk).

The first picture, the app fit pretty well in the screen:
   

But if I try to open the keyboard everything gets shifted over:
   

And if I try to put the application in landscape, you can see that it doesn't resize.
   


Maybe I try to ask if I can somehow make a more dynamic interface.

[mouffa]

these problems exist natively on Plasma, if you rotate upside down then Plasma can crash completely

[vinnie]

these problems exist natively on Plasma, if you rotate upside down then Plasma can crash completely

Yes but this is phos not plasma, and the problem is that this windows is unresizeable.
But searching a bit on the internet I saw that there is some work to make pysimplegui resizeable.
Ah I forgot to mention that it doesn't work only with tk but also with qt, web and wx.
So, i think that this alternative can be considered.

[mouffa]

the situation is strange with the GUIs when ported to the mobile, for example in Phosh too there is a setting for screen zoom, the default is 200% but some system windows fall out of the screen, then you choose 100% zoom and you can see the full desktop, the concept of movement and resizability of the windows is quite different on mobile as I can understand

[vinnie]

I really don't know, my feeling than now all these different "perspectives" are not yet well settled.
Perhaps another good idea is to take advantage of gnome/kde's webview and make web interfaces when the program is simple.
Just to not have size issues.

there is a python module for using webviews (never tried)

[mouffa]

don't expect anything in this project to be settled until you settle it yourself or is settled at some point possibly by breaking something that previously had been working

in your case you should develop the app and then do some research in order to fix the problem ad hoc for every case of libraries and GUI that you use, you can have a look at the source code of other projects to see how they tackle it or if they were just lucky with their choices

I am personally developing a new mobile interface because I have a different philosophy concerning mobile devices especially ones like pinephone which use old hardware

[swiley]

I really don't know, my feeling than now all these different "perspectives" are not yet well settled.
Perhaps another good idea is to take advantage of gnome/kde's webview and make web interfaces when the program is simple.
Just to not have size issues.

there is a python module for using webviews (never tried)

If you're doing python just use tkinter. There's no reason to overcomplicate this.

[vinnie]

... I am personally developing a new mobile interface because I have a different philosophy concerning mobile devices especially ones like pinephone which use old hardware

Well explain your philosophy, don't think it's not interesting to me.

swiley
If you're doing python just use tkinter. There's no reason to overcomplicate this.

But pysimpleguy is only a wrapper of tk with more simple api.