Another edition of the Ubuntu App Developer Week and another amazing knowledge sharing fest around everything related to application development in Ubuntu. Brought to you by a range of the best experts in the field, here's just a sample of the topics they talked about: App Developer Strategy, Bazaar, Bazaar Explorer, Launchpad, Python, Internationalization, Launchpad Translations, Unity, Unity 2D, Gedit Developer Plugins, the MyApps Portal, the App Review Board, the UbuntuSoftware Centre, Unity Mail, Launchpad Daily Builds, Ubuntu One APIs, Rapid App Development, Quickly, GooCanvas, PyGame, Unity Launcher, Vala, the App Developer Site, Indicators, Python Desktop Integration, Libgrip, Multitouch, Unity Lenses, Ubuntu One Files Integration, The Business Side of Apps, Go, Qt Quick... and more. Oh my!

And a pick of what they had to say:

We believe that to get Ubuntu from 20 million to 200 million users, we need more and better apps on Ubuntu Jonathan Lange on making Ubuntu a target for app developers

Bazaar is the world's finest revision control system Jonathan Riddell on Bazaar

So you've got your stuff, wherever you are, whichever device you're on Stuart Langridge on Ubuntu One

Oneiric's EOG and Evince will be gesture-enabled out of the box Jussi Pakkanen on multitouch in Ubuntu 11.10

I control the upper right corner of your screen ;-) Ted Gould on Indicators

• Day 1 Summary
• Day 2 Summary
• Day 3 Summary
• Day 4 Summary
• Day 5 Summary (this post)

Ubuntu App Developer Week - Day 5 Summary

Getting A Grip on Your Apps: Multitouch on GTK apps using Libgrip

In his session, Jussi talked about one of the most interesting technologies where Ubuntu is leading the way in the open source world: multitouch. Walking the audience through the Grip Tutorial, he described how to add gesture support to existing applications based on GTK+ 3. He chose to focus on the higher layer of the uTouch stack, where he explained the concepts on which libgrip, the gesture library, is built upon, such as device types and subscriptions. After having explored in detail the code examples, he then revealed that in Oneiric Eye Of GNOME and Evince, Ubuntu's default image viewer and default PDF reader, will be gesture-enabled.

Check out the session log.

Creating a Google Docs Lens

Neil introduced his session explaining the background behind Lenses: a re-architecture effort of the now superseded Places concept to make them more powerful, provide more features and make it easier to add features through a re-engineered API. Lenses create its own instance, add categories, filters and leave the searching to Scopes. The Lenses/Scopes pairs are purely requests for data, independent of the type of UI, and being provided by the libunity library, they can be written in any of the programming languages supported by GObject Introspection (Python, Javascript, C/C++, Vala, etc.). To illustrate all of this concepts, Neil devoted the rest of the session to a real example of creating a Lens for Google Docs.

Check out the session log.

Practical Ubuntu One Files Integration

Another hands-on session from Michael, with a real world example on how to supercharge apps with cloud support. Using his experience in integrating the Ubuntu One Files API to Deja Dup, the default backup application in Ubuntu, he went in detail through the code of a simple program to talk to a user's personal Ubuntu One file storage area. We liked Michael's session so much that it will very soon be featured as a tutorial on developer.ubuntu.com!

Check out the session log and Michael's awesome notes.

Publishing Your Apps in the Software Center: The Business Side

Ubuntu directly benefits from Canonical becoming a sustainable business to support its development, and that's exactly what John talked about. Being responsible for business development in the Ubuntu Software Centre, he's got a privileged  insight on how to make it happen. He started off explaining that the main goal is to present Ubuntu users with a large catalog of apps available for purchase, and then continued concentrating on how to submit paid applications to be published in the Software Centre. A simple 5-step process, the behind-the-scenes work can be summarized in: Canonical helps packaging the app, it hosts the app and provides the payment via pay.ubuntu.com, in a 80%/20% split. Other highlights include the facts that only non-DRM, non-licensed apps cannot be submitted right now, but there is ongoing work to implement license key support, and that MyApps, the online app submission portal, can take any nearly any content: apps with adverts, "free" online game clients and HTML5 apps.

Check out the session log.

Writing an App with Go

Gustavo's enthusiasm for Go, the new programming language created by Google shows every time you start a conversation with him on that topic. And it showed as well on this session, in which he created yet another "Hello world" application in a new language -you guessed-: Go. Along the way, he had time to describe all of the features of this new addition of the extensive family of programming languages: statically compiled with good reflection capabilities, structural typing, interfaces and more.

Check out the session log.

Qt Quick At A Pace

Closing the week on the last -and surprise- session, we had the luxury of having Donald, from the Nokia Qt team, the makers of Qt itself, to talk about Qt Quick. Using a clear and concise definition, Qt Quick is an umbrella term used to refer to QML and its associated tooling; QML being a declarative markup language with tight bindings to Javascript. A technology equally suited to mobile or to the desktop, QML enables developers to rapidly create animation-rich, pixmap-oriented UIs. Through the qtmediahub and Qt tutorial examples, he explored QML's capabilities and offered good practices for succesfully developing QML-based projects.

Check out the session log.

Wrapping Up

Thanks a lot for participating. I hope you enjoyed it  as much as I did, and see you again in 6 months time for another week full with app development goodness!

Ubuntu App Developer Week - Day 4 Summary

Qt Quick: Elements/Animations/States

The next Qt Quick session was all about creating attractive and usable user interfaces. Jürgen went through the QML tutorial documentation and code examples, showing us how to position elements with anchors, columns, rows and grids. Then onto states and transitions: describing the changes in an element's properties and how to switch between them. To finalize, the most impressive stuff: QML animations, in which he teached us the different types of animations and how to use them.

Check out the session log here.

Qt Quick: Rapid Prototyping

In Jürgen's words, Qt Quick was designed to bridge the gap between designers and developers, letting both groups to work with the same technologies and code base. He explained how Qt Creator provides a design mode which allows easy dragging and dropping of UI elements, and separation between code and interface. All through a natural and agile prototyping workflow.

Check out the session log here.

Rapid App Development with Quickly

Michael started introducing what Quickly at the heart is: a robust yet simple system of templates with boilerplate code and commands. The available templates are ubuntu-application, ubuntu-cli, ubuntu-pygame and ubuntu-flash-game, and on the Natty version, Quickly will feature the 'submitubuntu' command to help getting applications into the Software Center. All that being set straight, he then showed how to use Quickly and what it can do: from creating the first example application, to modifying the UI with 'quickly design' and Glade, into debugging and finally packaging.

Check out the session log here.

Getting Your App in the Distro: the Application Review Process

Linking from the previous session on how to create an app, Allison explained in a very clear way how to get your applications into Ubuntu, so that they make their way into the OS in a matter of weeks instead of having to wait until the next release. The first step is to submit a ticket to the App Review Board, giving them the essential details for the proposal. They'll then do the initial review, in which one of the reviewers will volunteer to walk you through the process and help you with suggestions or improvements, to bring the app to a state ready for the final review. There the board will vote in a meeting for the inclusion of the application. After the process description she answered the questions from the audience and wrapped up with some useful tips to application submitters.

Check out the session log here.

Adding Indicator Support to your Apps

Ted kicked off with an explanation of what indicators are and their intended use: they should not be used just because they are available - rather as a feature for long running applications, those that are more services to users, to expose that functionality. The next step was to describe how to create indicators through libappindicator, with any language supported by GObject Introspection, such as Python or Javascript, and how to add more features to a basic indicator: accessible labels and attention state. After that he described fallbacks, and how platforms not using Unity can nevertheless use indicators. The final minutes were dedicated to the future of indicators, that for now will focus on API cleanup and stabilization, and introspection improvements.

Check out the session log here.

Using Launchpad to get your application translated -

As a follow up to the talk on how to add native language support to your applications on Monday, Henning described the next step: how to make them translatable in Launchpad and grow a translation community around them. In the first part he showed how to set up a demo project using Launchpad's staging server, and shared some recommendations on how to make sure the application is correctly set up for translations, followed by an overview on some Gettext concepts Launchpad relies upon. From there, it was straight into business: setting up a translatable project in Launchpad, getting translatable templates imported and exposed to translators, creating a translation community for your project and the workflow for translation. A very detailed overview to get your application to talk any language.

Check out the session log here.

The Day Ahead: Upcoming Sessions for Day 5

16:00 UTC
Qt Quick: Extend with C++ - Jürgen Bocklage-Ryannel
Sometimes you would like to extend Qt Quick with your own native extension. Jürgen will show you some ways how to do it.

17:00 UTC
Phonon: Multimedia in Qt - Harald Sitter
Harald, as the lead developer of the Qt/KDE multimedia library Phoon will tell you about the awesomeness that Phonon provides and how it achieves ultimate portability, so that it can even run on vending machines. He'll also tell you hos to create a video player with 3 lines of code (or in 30 seconds without any code) and much more.

18:00 UTC
Integrating music applications with the Sound Menu - Conor Curran
So you've seen the slick sound menu in Ubuntu, and you're developing a multimedia application, right? You're then wondering how to seamlessly integrate it into Ubuntu and use all the nice features from the menu as well? Wonder no more, for Conor is the man behind the sound menu and he'll be delighted to teach you how.

19:00 UTC
pkgme: Automating The Packaging Of Your Project - James Westby
Once you've developed a cool application you'll want to package it and distribute it to users so that they can easily install it in their favourite platform. James will show you how this can be both easy and fun letting pkgme do all the work for you.

20:00 UTC
Unity Technical Q&A - Jason Smith and Jorge Castro
You've heard about Unity, the new UI concept which is going to improve several orders of magnitude how you interact with your computer in Ubuntu. You are probably using it already, and you'll surely have questions and will want to learn more about the coolness it brings. Jason Smith, from the Unity development team, and Jorge Castro, from the Community team know all about Unity and they'll be here to chat with you.

21:00 UTC
Lightning Talks - Nigel Babu
As the final treat to close the week, Nigel has organized a series of lightning talks to showcase a medley of cool applications: CLI Companion, Unity Book Lens, Bikeshed, circleoffriends, Algorithm School, Sunflower FM, Tomahawk Player, Classbot - your app could be in this list next time, do check them out!

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Ubuntu App Developer Week - Day 3 Summary

Qt Quick: QML the Language

In his first session, Jürgen gave a short intro to Qt Quick's QML language and how to use it. The first steps were to install Qt and Qt Creator, followed by a description of what Qt Quick is and how developers came up with a declarative way, similar to CSS or JSON to write in the language. All that clear, he then started with the Qt Quick tutorial and code examples that could be run with qmlviewer, the qml interpreter. Onto the second part, he focused on the QML languate, and going into the detail on how to create custom QML components. There were also lots of pointers to the excellent Qt documentation.

Check out the session log here.

Make your applications work in the cloud with Ubuntu One

Stuart gave a great overview on how to add the cloud to existing apps and how to make new apps for the cloud, letting Ubuntu One do all the hard work for you: from managing identities, password renewal to sharing data between applications. And all that on the web, the desktop, mobile... all your stuff everywhere! He then showed us some simple code to sync playlists on the cloud, ready for streaming. File sync is also an important Ubuntu One feature apps can make use of for sharing, and he also went through a couple of the many cool ways you can use it. The last mention was on API documentation, something Stuart is working on in this cycle.

Check out the session log here.

Take control of your desktop easily with DBus

In this session Alejandro showed us in a hands-on and easy to follow way different bits and pieces of D-Bus, and how applications in the desktop can communicate through it. He went through real life examples to show how to do simple tasks and explained how they can be achieved with D-Bus.

Check out the session log here.

Touchégg: Bringing Multitouch Gestures to your Desktop

By José Expósito

Check out the session log here.

Unity: Integrating with Launcher and Places

Mikkel used the intro of the talk to set a couple of things straight: "Places" are going to be called "Lenses" in the next cycle, and libunity does not yet guarantee API or ABI stability. He then followed with the Unity Launcher integration, and how applications can use static quicklists, and more advanced features such as count, progress bar, window flashing and dynamic quicklists. The second part were Places: remote databases that provide data for Unity to render. Through a Python code example he showed us in detail all the aspects of creating a Unity Place.

Check out the session log here.

Tracking Source Code History with Bazaar

Jelmer, in his experience of seasoned Bazaar hacker started off introducing what bzr is: a modern distributed version control system. He then went on with the basics with a hands-on example, going through the creation of a branch, the first commit, and describing several of the most handy bzr commands. As a wrap-up, he showcased more advanced features such as source recipes: scripts that combine branches and build daily Debian packages from them.

Check out the session log here.

The Day Ahead: Upcoming Sessions for Day 4

16:00 UTC
Qt Quick: Elements/Animations/States - Jürgen Bocklage-Ryannel
Another day and more featured Qt content: this time Jürgen will take us through different elements/animations and states Qt Quick provides, and will show us through examples how to make use of them.

17:00 UTC
Qt Quick: Rapid Prototyping - Jürgen Bocklage-Ryannel
If one session weren't enough, here's the continuation: more Qt goodness, this time a hands-on session to develop a small application from start to finish and experience the whole process from the front row.

18:00 UTC
Rapid App Development with Quickly - Michael Terry
Mike will show you how to write applications in no time with the power of Python and Quickly: bringing back the fun in programming.

19:00 UTC
Getting Your App in the Distro: the Application Review Process - Allison Randal
A while back we created an easy process defining how to get applications into Ubuntu, so in order to be able to add them in a matter of weeks, rather than waiting for the next release. Allison, in her Ubuntu Technical Architect and Application Review Board member hat, will walk you through the Application Review Process

20:00 UTC
Adding Indicator Support to your Apps - Ted Gould
Join the man who knows most about indicators in a session that will teach you how to integrate your application even more into Ubuntu. They're slick, robust and consistent: bringing indicator support to your apps.

21:00 UTC
Using Launchpad to get your application translated - Henning Eggers
One of the coolest features of Launchpad is that it helps growing a translation community around your project. You can make your application translatable in Launchpad and be able to deliver it into almost any language. Henning will teach you how to do this, picking up where the previous session on translations left.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!