Kube, our PIM-Client in the making, is supposed to run on a variety of platforms and form-factors. We aim to provide a consistent look and feel across them all. If you know how to use Kube on your desktop machine, you will know how to use it on your Android phone or tablet as well. So what we are going to do, is building a UI for the phone, allowing it to display multiple pages on the tablet and in the end serving it on the desktop as well. Good idea, right?
Not quite. While consistency is our goal, we don’t believe in “one UI to rule them all”, at least not in the sense of just getting an enlarged version of your tablet app as a desktop application. Instead, what you will get with Kube is a specifically optimized user interface for each form-factor you are running it on. Thanks to QtQuick, the only difference will be “a little” UI code, the core will stay the same.
To achieve our UI goals, we are employing Kirigami UI. It offers us:
1) A set of UI Components that seamlessly integrate with QtQuick Controls to build a pretty UIs for Kube.
2) but more importantly: UI/UX patterns, that make the UI not only pretty but usable and bring us closer to our goal of convergence, despite beeng specially tailored for the form-factor.
No good blogpost without a picture. So here it is: A first look at Kube on mobile, build with Kirigami.