This is what people like me have been getting at for ages when we talk about decoupling interfaces from application logic. It's also incidentally a really strong argument for decoupling state presentation from visual presentation. I should be able to build a mobile interface for Audacity without rebuilding Audacity both because the audio processing logic should be separate from the interface and because the interface should be separate from the visuals -- I should be able to consume Audacity's interface as an XML tree and pipe it into a separate renderer.
Because if that was the case it wouldn't be that hard to make Audacity mobile friendly (or at least more mobile friendly than it currently is).
As a bonus, if your interface is consumable as an XML tree without rendering anything, it's very likely going to be much easier to make the interface accessible. From what I can see in the documentation, Audacity as a native app on desktop doesn't work with screen readers on Linux.
This is not necessarily anyone's fault beyond GUI toolkit designers, it's not particular to Audacity, but it's a paradigm shift. Some visual controls wouldn't work well on mobile, but for most apps including Audacity there's really no reason (other than lack of existing infrastructure and toolkit support) why people shouldn't be able to just swap out those visual controls with ones that do work on mobile and use Audacity normally otherwise.
This is what people like me have been getting at for ages when we talk about decoupling interfaces from application logic. It's also incidentally a really strong argument for decoupling state presentation from visual presentation. I should be able to build a mobile interface for Audacity without rebuilding Audacity both because the audio processing logic should be separate from the interface and because the interface should be separate from the visuals -- I should be able to consume Audacity's interface as an XML tree and pipe it into a separate renderer.
Because if that was the case it wouldn't be that hard to make Audacity mobile friendly (or at least more mobile friendly than it currently is).
As a bonus, if your interface is consumable as an XML tree without rendering anything, it's very likely going to be much easier to make the interface accessible. From what I can see in the documentation, Audacity as a native app on desktop doesn't work with screen readers on Linux.
This is not necessarily anyone's fault beyond GUI toolkit designers, it's not particular to Audacity, but it's a paradigm shift. Some visual controls wouldn't work well on mobile, but for most apps including Audacity there's really no reason (other than lack of existing infrastructure and toolkit support) why people shouldn't be able to just swap out those visual controls with ones that do work on mobile and use Audacity normally otherwise.