The Ubuntu App Showdown | Hacker News Reader

The Ubuntu App Showdown

developer.ubuntu.com

48 pointsiProject40 comments

They talk about Rapid Application Development, and it makes me sad. It makes me sad because I still haven't found a RAD tool that works on the same level of Visual Basic.

Forgetting all the things Visual Basic did wrong, the biggest thing it did right was the UI builder. When you put a button on the screen, it wrote the code for you. When you put a text box on the screen, it wrote the code for you. When you double click the button in the designer, it takes you to the code for that button. You select "onClick" and type "textbox1 = "Hello world!". Save and run, click the button, and the textbox says "Hello world!".

VB made UI easy. Glade is nice, but it still doesn't come close to the ease of use that VB brought to the market. I don't know of anything else that has since. VB was a ecosystem that let accountants build software. With all the bad that comes with the good, this is still unmatched as far as my research has shown me.

REALBasic maybe? I know a couple of companies that use it and they seem to like it.

There is Lazarus I stumbled upon once. Tried it a little and seems to do things quite much like VB. Its basically a Delphi clone I guess. But damnit, who wants to use Pascal!

BTW how about Mono? Isn't that supposed to be .NET clone?

Mono recreates the code of Visual Basic, but doesn't have the VB UI builder (last time I tried it was in mid-2011, might have changed).

Check out microsofts "lightSwitch" for a RAD.

Excel might be even more approachable. (And it does fall back on VB for more complex tasks.)

Gambas[1] is basically VB for Linux, with differences[2] but rooted in the same language.

[1]http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

[2]http://gambasdoc.org/help/doc/diffvb?view

Flash Builder works how you describe. And the Adobe AIR platform is quite a good platform. It's cross mobile.

Anyone doing a single column outliner with export to html/text and libreoffice? Like Acta for Ubuntu?

Seriously, what Ubuntu Software Centre needs is a 'wanted app' system of some kind. Perhaps people say how much they would pay as well. Could be fun.

http://www.reddit.com/r/ubuntuappshowdown/

Turns out there is a place to post suggestions

Interesting that they talk about "Ubuntu" apps rather than Linux apps. I wonder if this is just a marketing thing or if they are going to try and get "exclusive" apps that are not available on other distros?

It's probably just a marketing thing. Look at ubuntu.com, there's not a single mention of "Linux" across the whole front page.

Neither does http://www.android.com/, or http://www.debian.org/ . While factually correct, I don't see your point.

This isn't really anything new. When I worked for Canonical, they tended to talk about Ubuntu and avoid mentioning Linux. I don't think the point of this is to get exclusive apps, though. Sure they would love to have exclusive apps, but at the end of the day everything is still open source.

They do want apps that integrate well with Ubuntu. So if you write an app that integrates with Ubuntu One or with Unity then you're going to have a better chance of winning than if you write a plain GTK+ app. So that will probably tend to keep these apps in Ubuntu and out of other distros, but that's the extent of that and I don't think the goal of it is to keep apps out of Fedora or whatever.

They wouldn't have much to gain from fighting against other Linux distros. It would be like fighting over breadcrumbs in the consumer market. It would be pointless. Their real competitor is Windows, and they should be using marketing and partnerships with manufacturers (Dell and others) and big app developers (EA, Valve, etc) and whatever is necessary to push Ubuntu/Linux more into the mainstream.

If this is indeed their plan, though, there is a pretty big flaw in it. Why are they trying so much to get "inspired" by Mac OS, when they should be trying to get inspired by Windows, and make it easy for the many more Windows users to transition easily from Windows to Ubuntu? As a Windows user, this is why I find Linux Mint Cinnamon (also based on Ubuntu) so much easier and less frustrating to use than regular Ubuntu. Of course Windows 8 is completely changing the direction for their UI/UX from the "old Windows" style, too, so there's that, but I have no reason to believe it will be successful, yet.

Many Linux distros (Mandrake especially) spent years trying to win market share by cloning Windows and didn't get very far.

Turns out cheap looking Windows clone that can't run most Windows apps isn't really what the market is looking for.

Of course they are inspired by what Apple is doing (so is pretty much everyone now, including MS) but I think Unity/Gnome3 are different enough to stand on their own merits (or lack thereof).

I'm not sure what Canonical would get out of a partnership with Dell though , since their software is free they aren't going to get a cut on units sold.

"I'm not sure what Canonical would get out of a partnership with Dell though, since their software is free they aren't going to get a cut on units sold."

Canonical charges 20% transaction fee for each app sold http://developer.ubuntu.com/publish/commercial-software-faqs...

Their prime target - windows users - are in general confused by the concept of Linux distributions. Calling it just Ubuntu, and having PPAs and apps (or "computer programs" as old-timers call them) just for Ubuntu (or at least, that will definitely "just work" in Ubuntu) will make it easier to get windows users.

The apps have to run on ubuntu. It would be silly to describe it as "A linux apps contest where the apps have to work on Ubuntu" instead of "An Ubuntu apps contest"

This isn't a marketing thing or trying to lock other distributions out, it's about having a simple platform that people can make applications on without having to drink from a firehose.

Ubuntu-as-a-platform can make opinionated choices what to support. This is why when someone asks "How do I make an application for Ubuntu" you can answer with "Quickly and Python" instead of "well that depends."

It's nice to have a default.

My friend(http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=owaislone) is doing a clone of Fluid App(http://fluidapp.com/). He made very good progress in past week and is currently working on proper desktop integration (notify-osd, unity integration, app indicator support) and userscripts support. I am really looking forward to it.

Reddit link http://www.reddit.com/r/ubuntuappshowdown/comments/vggkn/app...

I'm a little concerned about this.

* It presents the idea of adding several dozen new rapidly-created "apps" to Ubuntu as a necessarily good thing. We don't need "more apps", we need better solutions, which IMO often means fewer apps.

* From the rules: "The application must contain exclusively original code and the Participant must be the original author of the content." This effectively limits library use to only what's in the default repositories, right? I suppose we're not allowed to use things along the lines of the Dropbox SDK?

Here's my submission:

HumanTask is a personal task manager for humans - http://srirangan.net/2012-06-humantask-is-a-personal-task-ma...

I'll have a play when you release it on the USC

Here it is: http://srirangan.net/2012-07-humantask-preview-release-get-i...

What are the judging criterion for the contest and who judges?

If you read the post you will see the list of judges and criteria.

Haha wow, I'm an idiot. I went straight for the large orange circles and passed off the intro paragraph completely.

All the people on the review panel are men. Could be better.

Ubuntu could do better here to have a more representative voting panel. 0% female judges is pretty bad.

Probably not. (Except as an unusual coincidence.)

Picture from a python conference:

http://www.efytimes.com/admin/useradmin/photo/Pycon-UK.jpg

As in all the other pictures that appears from a google search it's >90% men. It's perfectly understandable that review panels will have >90% men on average, if they select for (presumably equally distributed among programmers) qualifications, passion and interest.

More than 50% of app purchasers are women, so there's definitely plenty of women who would be interested in doing this.

On Ubuntu?

If you want the average consumer to weigh in, fine. Look at download/purchase statistics, canvass users or do focus groups. If you want qualified, passionate and experienced programmers you're out of luck, those are mostly men. An overrepresentation (compared to the total number of candidates that would be good enough, of course some of them are women) it is bound to cost you something. Is having 50% (or whatever) women in open source related activity more important to you than having the best possible open source software?

More diversity in things like this does improve software. I learnt this at one of the fastest growing software companies in the world.

Do men know best what women want? No. Get women involved, and there is a better result.

If we don't begin to be inclusive, then Ubuntu will stay a closed mens club - and we will all be poorer for it.

I'd say what for-profit companies do is the best indicator we have of the value of gender balance vs. just-making-something-people-want [to buy]--there's an imbalance in those too. Apple, for example, has an all male executive team. Microsoft has one woman (hr). Google has a few women (pr, hr/lobbying and marketing).

http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/

http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/management/

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/slt.aspx

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/programming-and-development...

I expect an objection that assumes for-profit businesses don't act rationally to maximize profit, I won't pursue that.

"I expect an objection that assumes for-profit businesses don't act rationally to maximize profit, I won't pursue that."

Why not? Sounds like a valid objection that undermines your entire argument.

It would be, if it was provably or probably true. I don't think it is. But I wasn't (and I'm not) going to spend an hour arguing the point.