GNOME Software Center and YOU!

Do you maintain an application that people use? Do you want people to be able to install it easily in the GNOME Software Center?

If both of those are true, please read the newly finalised AppData specification and ship one tiny extra file in your tarball. People will love you for doing it, and I’ll really appreciate it. Maybe post 3.10 we can do a GNOME Goal for all the core GNOME modules, but of course this applies to GNOME, KDE, XFCE and random standalone apps.

2000th ColorHug

This week we will hit a milestone we thought we might not ever reach – selling ColorHug device number 2000. We started making ColorHugs just 18 months ago and have come a long way from the first batch that was hand-built on a desk in our back bedroom. I started the project as a hobby to make some embedded hardware as it was something I enjoyed doing at University and hadn’t done for a while. I assured my wife we wouldn’t need to make more then 50. So imagine how we felt when we got over 800 responses to a single blog post. I only wrote it to check it was worth making that initial batch! So this hobby turned into a second job almost overnight that came with all the fun dealing with customer emails, legal issues and setting up a business that pays tax. Ania was not best pleased when our lovely guest room turned into our manufacturing department and my “hobby” had her screwing devices together on weekends, evenings and even on Boxing Day.

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A lot has changed since that first batch.  From outsourcing the PCB fabrication and to occasionally recruiting my mum, dad and of course Ania in the manufacture, assembly, dispatch and administrative aspects of ColorHug. We finally have a new outside office – so after nearly two years we have our house back! And most importantly we have had a little girl, who keeps us very busy and thus has slowed the development of the ColorHug Spectro.

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Building an OpenHardware device has definitely been a worthwhile pursuit and something I believe in. We will have built and shipped 2000 devices all around the world, including issuing two lots of free gifts to update early adopters with the latest accessories and design improvements. We’ve also built a large community who are using ColorHugs all over the world for calibrating external screens and panels in domestic and commercial settings.

We still don’t make much profit on each unit and definitely wouldn’t recommend making calibration hardware as a get rich quick scheme, but we have enjoyed growing ColorHug and fostering the community that has built up around it. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has helped make ColorHug a success – from those who’ve helped make the device through to those who contribute in the community by testing and reporting bugs.

Some interesting statistics from the last 18 months:

  • Total Sold: 1998
  • Number of Batches: 8
  • Typical number of jiffy bags ready to go at any time: 60
  • Number of returns: 8
  • Number of automated emails from PayPal: 2520
  • Number of emails Ania and I have sent (most semi-automated): 5087
  • Number of LiveCD updates: 9
  • Number of different countries sent to: 21
  • Amount of money spent on postage: £9,354

So, basically, we’re very humbled and grateful! Richard, Ania and baby Hughes.

 

AppData Proposal, a.k.a. How to make your application appear in the software center

This morning I wrote up this proposal. If you maintain an application that you think should be in the GNOME Software Center, I would appreciate your views. Thanks!

p.s. Don’t actually commit anything to your modules just yet, I want to finish the polishing and wording before asking people to write anything. For example, the format of the long description should probably be much more prescriptive.

GNOME Software and DOAP Files

Progress on gnome-software is progressing nicely. Most of the major functionality is semi-working, although there are an awful lot of rough (and unimplemented) edges. Now the UI is coming together somewhat, it’s probably time to talk about what data it is going to consume. I’ve talked a lot before about extracting application icon and translations from .desktop files, but now I wanted to talk about long, formatted descriptions. Something like:

long-description

So where do we get this long description from? There seems to be many possible places to put this data:

  1. On the distribution web service
  2. In the ${app}.desktop files of the upstream application
  3. In the DOAP file of the upstream tarball
  4. In the package file description
  5. Some new ${app}.xml file shipped by application with all this extra data
  6. Some simple ${app}.md file containing markdown

Each has positives and negatives:

  1. All distros have to do basically the same work, and have to retranslate these over and over. -ENORESOURCE.
  2. It’s not much fun to do multiline descriptions trying to work on one line in a .desktop file, and trying to do rich text like hyperlinks and bullet points is impossible.
  3. DOAP files are not translated, and we only get one file per project, not per app. You probably want a different description for LibreOffice Calc than LibreOffice Presenter.
  4. Same problem as 3, and it also pushes the work to the distros, like 1. And it’s not typically translated.
  5. YAFF. Yet Another Format. Okay, it lets us define rich text (SGML/DocBook/whatever) but it’s another file format to be added to intltool and I’m not sure how easy it would be to get random projects to ship this.
  6. Easy to write, although much harder to extend in the future with things like screenshots and the like. Also, very hard to translate.

Also, anything except option 1 requires the use to have a big cache of all the possible applications they want to search for. So far I’m leaning on some kind of composite approach:

  • Add a X-SoftwareCenterLongDescURI key to the desktop file
  • Have a web URL with an .xml file on any remote server.
  • Download and load the .xml file when the application detail view is opened
  • Optionally translate the .xml.in using intltool and update the description at release time
  • Applications not shipping .desktop files with X-SoftwareCenterLongDescURI just get a shitty app-detail view in the software center.

Comments, suggestions, flames, all very welcome. If/when we come to a consensus, I’ll write up a proper proposal with some guidelines for application authors. Thanks.