

Ubuntu Looks To An SDK, Improved App Development - angersock
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIxNjU

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meaty
Seriously, just no. This is entirely against the spirit of open source
software and Linux entirely. It just turns Ubuntu into another incompatible
walled garden. I've had enough of all these turf wars between "app stores" and
walled gardens. To hell with them all - this is not why I use Linux and this
is the same for many people.

I think Shuttleworth's intentions have finally become apparent. Hypocritical
sell out.

I'm moving the last 3 LTS machines to Debian tomorrow and cancelling our
landscape service.

~~~
vidarh
That's rather premature before you even know what they want to include. A
large chunk of the API's and libraries that are in widespread use across most
Linux distro's today started off promoted by one or the other of the
commercial Linux distros.

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tronix
With this and an ubuntu app store for paid software I'd consider porting my
software to Ubuntu.

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lucian1900
The Ubuntu Software Centre already has paid apps, and this SDK wouldn't be all
that useful, seeing as how Gtk, GL and so on are well documented anyway.

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reidrac
Yep, let me add an example link to complement your comment:

<https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/braid/>

I don't know how big is that, if Ubuntu users are really buying applications.

EDIT: the apt:// URI triggers the Ubuntu Software Center that looks like this
<http://i.imgur.com/UL3dq.png>

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jiggy2011
Not sure what an Ubuntu SDK would look like. Everything would surely target
GTK3 , Unity etc which is going to be reasonably cross platform.

Having said that it would be nice to have a "ready to go" stack of tools to
build Ubuntu apps.

Ideally do similar to MS and include first class support for JS for web
developers as well as something for folks who like static typing.

~~~
eterps
It would be nice if you could use simple markup to create the GTK3/Qt/Unity
application. That way far more people could contribute to open source. They
would just fork the product fix or add something and send a pull request to
the maintainer. On the web you can do 'View source' everywhere, why not be
able to 'Edit source' on every open source project making it easy to
contribute for everybody. You could even have something similar to a DOM
inspector to locate a problem fast without spending days getting acquainted
with the project's source code.

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natrius
<http://glade.gnome.org/>

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vidarh
There was a fantastic prototype called Entity years back that used a similar
model and took it much further. Everything ran of a document object model that
you'd then script with javascript, Perl or C (which was passed to gcc to
compile a .so at runtime....). They had an example editor that let you edit
the editor itself at runtime.

Seemed quite Smaltalk inspired. Unfortunately it died and disappeared.

~~~
eterps
Yes, this seems to be the kind of thing I had in mind.

~~~
vidarh
I really should dig it up - I have a copy of it somewhere. The original author
seems to have disappeared without a trace, and the website was taken down... A
shame. It was rough around the edges, and some of the features were a bit
"creative" (requiring gcc to be installed so you can runtime-compile C code
into .so's was perhaps a bit over the top...), but it was a fascinating
experiment.

Grip used to be written in it (only "production" quality application I saw
using it): <http://freecode.com/projects/grip> but I think it was rewritten
without Entity at some point.

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yock
I'm not quite sure how to feel about this. On one hand an OS-level SDK (that
isn't directly tied to the kernel or glibc) feels grossly overdue, and I'm not
sure how you'd go about doing this in a way that is distribution-agnostic. On
the other hand, tying your development to a single distribution is quite the
antithesis to Linux and doesn't seem to be in the best interest of anyone,
including those using the SDK.

~~~
bitJericho
It'd be a pain at first, but look at other APIs like a database ORM that
supports MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL. The commands to the end-developer are all the
same for any of the platforms, but the underlying API can use any of the
supported database engines.

If the Ubuntu API were done right, it could be ported, to say, Fedora, and use
any underlying fedora libraries without the end-developer having to change her
code at all! It could be extremely useful. You'd have a Linux API that can
source the best API to use for the end-users current configuration.

~~~
jhealy
You've just described KDE, Gnome and a suite of other graphics toolkits. Do we
really need another one in the mix?

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mtgx
As someone who would like to use Linux as the main OS, but doesn't think
Ubuntu is yet that consumer-friendly, I believe this is much needed. What I
dislike most about the Linux ecosystem is the applications. Most of them look
like they were designed in the pre-2000 era. How is Ubuntu or any Linux distro
to become a consumer OS when the apps are so ugly and not modern? How will it
attract consumers in the market and increase demand for it?

So I hope they put a lot of emphasis on the design tools and design resources.
They need to do it at the level Apple, Google (with Holo) and Microsoft has
done it (with Metro). Make it extremely easy for developers to make beautiful
apps with stock resources.

But before they even begin to do this, I strongly urge them to take another
look at Unity, and rethink it a little before they go all-in with it for the
next 5-10 years. I still find Unity slow and frustrating (usability wise).
Unless the apps will also be made to be touch-ready, forget about the idea of
having the UI look tablet-ready. It doesn't help much if only the OS is touch-
ready, but all the apps aren't, and if it's only the OS, then it will just
annoy the PC users.

I also think they need to further hide some of the complexities of the Linux
OS, like all the package stuff and command line stuff. A normal user doesn't
even want to see that, and will freak out if he does, because he won't
understand what it is, and will just get the perception that Linux is too hard
for him.

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tomrod
I too find Unity unwieldy. I discovered alt+~ yesterday, which allows
switching among local file windows--that was a huge slowdown for me!

~~~
mike-cardwell
iirc, OSX behaves in the exact same way as Ubuntu. Alt-Tab, to switch between
applications, and Alt-something to switch between windows of an application. I
could be wrong though, it's been over a year since I used OSX now...

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silon3
This is where Alt+Tab in Ubuntu/Gnome was just fine before and the new OSX
emulation has ruined it for me. I've switched to XFCE.

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mike-cardwell
Hmm, maybe the reason I like Unity is because my previous machine was a Mac
and everything just makes sense. I guess if you're coming from Windows, you're
going to get annoyed with certain things, but only the same things you'd get
annoyed with if you were moving to OSX.

~~~
one-man-bucket
I couldn't stand Unity either, and for me it was more an issue of coming from
an earlier version of Ubuntu (gnome).

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wildster
They should adopt the Human Interface Guidelines that Elementary OS use.
<http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines>

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programminggeek
I think Ubuntu and Linux in general would benefit from a standard SDK for
packaging and selling apps. Yes, selling apps. There are plenty of package
managers and so on if I want to do FOSS, but if I want to make money selling
software for an operating system that I love, make it easy for me to do that.
Otherwise, I'd rather dev for Mac or Windows or Android or iOS.

Ubuntu making their own SDK would solve the "which set of tools should I use"
problem that I think makes commercial Linux dev less awesome. Ubuntu's already
gone down this road a little bit with their Quickly app framework, but I think
they could take it a bit farther.

Mac, Windows, Android, iOS all benefit greatly from a standard app SDK. Add
Ubuntu to that list and I'll be a happy camper.

