Akira: budding a new application for UI/UX design

With the implicit support of the elementary project, which with the latest version of the system was formed on an application distribution platform with enough impetus, the start of a crowdfunding campaign is announced with which to promote the development of Akira , a new design application for Linux focused on the creation of user interfaces.

" Open source is about freedom. Akira is going to give freedom to designers who want to use open source , "says Alessandro Castellani, web developer and creator of Akira. " I am also a Linux user, and I have been for years, but I am the first to admit that the current state of the Linux desktop does not allow designers to be productive and competitive in a world dominated by extremely fast, reliable and proprietary applications. modern for MacOS and Windows ".

With such an idea in mind, Castellani started a year ago the development of Akira, a UI (user interfaces) and UX (user experience) native Linux application, written in Vala and GTK+ 3 in tune with GNOME applications. and elementary OS. But he realized that it was too much work to do it alone, and that is why he is now launching a funding campaign to, in order to reach his economic goal, hire full-time the developers he needs, among which are some of the project elementary

Akira's campaign can be found on Kickstarter , where all the details of why, when and how of this project are given. The goal is 48,957 $, of which only 2,410 have been collected, although there are still 44 days to complete.

To achieve this , the estimated launch date for the first stable version of Akira would be for September 2019 and Distribution Format package, source code apart (any Linux distribution can compile it for themselves), Flatpak, besides being available in the repositories of elementary OS. Also, during the development period they will publish test versions through their own PPA (so it should be available for any Debian derivative).

Now, the question that you ask yourself: is something like Akira needed in Linux? According to Castellani, he aims to offer a genuine replacement for applications such as Sketch, Figma or Adobe XD , which others such as Inkscape, Glade and even Qt Creator can not cover. However, there are similar and open source things for Linux. Things like Pencil or Alva , which are not SVG editors or graphics, and in whose development you could perhaps contribute, instead of starting with something new. At the same time, the differences in the base technologies proposed by Akira are much more novel.

In any case and this initiative thrives or not, you can take a look at the source code of Akira on GitHub.

As we always tell you, think carefully before investing your money. It is one of the reasons why we barely echo economic campaigns, unless they sound interesting and come well endorsed.