The buzz word resonating throughout the mobile industry right now is ‘convergence’ – and Canonical are leading the charge to make it a consumer reality.
With Ubuntu Touch for smartphones and tablets, a (promising) new display server in Mir and a new UX proffered in Unity 8, its fair to say that the opportunities to create awesome things on Ubuntu is easier than before.
And ‘easy’ is a good word. Using the Ubuntu SDK, developers can create one app that runs on all of the various Ubuntu platforms – from desktop to phone. The same code is used, but a different “face” presented to the user depending on the device or screen size it is being used on.
This multi-faceted approach — the ‘responsive design’ of software development, if you will — aims to unify the disparate user experience one encounters when hopping from mobile to desktop to tablet and back again.
Canonical are far from being the only ones chasing this goal. In the latest development SDK for Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft has added features for creating similar ‘convergent’ apps on their (soon to be unified) tablet and phone platforms.
While Windows is busying playing catch-up, Ubuntu Touch is racing further ahead. (tweet this)
To show just how sturdy the foundations for convergence on Ubuntu is, Canonical’s Jono Bacon walks through an example app in the following video. Karma Machine, a community-built Reddit application written using the Ubuntu SDK, features optimised interfaces for phone, tablet, and desktop.