Pigeonhole

Android, iOS, weird bar phone OSes – is that it? Far from it! GNU/Linux strikes back against the big tech oligopoly not only on desktop operating system but also on mobile.

Well, not quite unfortunately :(

Anyhoo, do not despair but ask: Why is this,

why are people choosing a caging, privacy invasive, often ad-bloated, disrespectful mobile operating platform over a free, non-intrusive and easy to use mobile operating system?

Like for example GNU/Linux with GNOME mobile as a shell.

Huh, there a quite a few reasons. Not to get into too many details, but for example it’s quite technical to install, performance is at its best adequate, many apps and services are not available, … , and the interfaces of many popular apps are either not mobile friendly or do not exist for the platform.

Process

In this particular project a very simple email apps was designed. It took the K9/Thunderbird Android app as a starting point. Only the standard GNOME interface components and/or relatively well established design patterns for the platform were used.

Instead of creating the mockup with a customary design tool like Figma, it was implemented in the spirit of free/open source software: Workbench. Workbench is a program for creating interface mockups for the GNOME platform. However the design can not be drawn with the usual graphical tools but it is written in a markup language (in this case XML or Blueprint). The mockup can than be made interactive with the addition of a bit of code (JS or Python or many more).

As a reference for creating the mockup other pre-made examples in the Workbench library can be taken into account. The official GTK and Libadwaita documentation will also help a lot (GTK and Libadwaita are the toolkits and libraries for creating frontends in GNOME).

After many hours messing in the semi well documented Workbench and a few iterations later this my the product of the class:

Pigeonhole, a simple mobile mail client in a familiar() GNOME style.

The code for the mockup can be found here: https://gitlab.com/rou-som/senditmail/

To spin it up install Linux on a PC or in a virtual machine (if you haven’t already), install Workbench, clone/download the git repository and open it with Workbench.