Appril is coming

August 13, 2015 — BarryK

At first, I thought that the codename "Appril" is pretty cringe-worthy, however, I kept using it and it grew on me.

Appril is now the official name for this special build of Quirky. This is a continuation of the April series, the same code-base, and with the kitchen sink thrown in for app developers.

It is going to be big, the download is likely to be over 900MB, however, it is a complete out-of-the-box app development environment. The intention is that you can get going creating and compiling apps for Linux and Android, without having to download anything, and even be offline.

Appril has the "devx" built-in, whereas pups normally have it as a separate SFS or PET file. This has everything for compiling, including Qt5.

Also included are the JDK, Android Studio, Android SDK, App Inventor, and Qt Creator.

The intention is that there will be no manual setup, just click an icon on the desktop and off you go. Not quite there yet.

There is another development tool that I am thinking of adding, and I am hoping to get it all wrapped up and Appril released in about a week.

Comments

QT Creator, out of the box, compiles applications for the Linux desktop.

To get it to create Android apps is my current project.

The Android NDK is required, and this is a massive 377MB download. That is going to blow up the size of Appril too much, fortunately I was able to cut it right down by taking out only the parts needed to build for armv7.

armv7 apps is adequate. Of course, anyone can in the future download the full NDK.

Then there is Qt. This has to be recompiled. I had misunderstood -- I thought that the one compile of Qt would do for both Linux desktop and Android, but not so.

The special compile of Qt for Android is happening right now. If/when it completes, I will post the steps. Those steps, incidentally, are poorly documented in the Qt official docs.

http://livecode.com/

And yes, it will be in Appril.

I posted earlier about LiveCode:

http://bkhome.org/news/201506/livecode-multi-platform-coding.html

Tags: linux