Purism’s blog recently posted a new howto on building a Librem 5 app. If you have been wanting to build a Linux app this is a great time to start with both phones and desktops running your app.
The video shows the first steps are a good start, but there are a few tips left off in the video:
If you are looking to build the interface of your app in a Visual-basic/Visual-studio /WindowBuilder sort of way just dropping new controls onto a form, you will be glad to know that that odd xml file format file you see in the video starting with
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<interface>
<requires lib="gtk+" version="3.x"/>
<object ...Is the same type of xml you will see if you open a .glade file in the Glade interface builder. Check out the building an interface demo for more info on how to do that!
Second, this video doesn’t show the interaction of having the two screens – it is seamless and pretty neat how on the Librem phone, the launcher works on the small screen, yet you can take your attached mouse+keyboard from a USBC dock and drag a window to drag window to either screen, prep it on a small screen AND bigger screen. It is just like a laptop with a second screen… well, one that has a 5-inch built-in screen. This lets you see how your app will actually work on an actual device, on the device!