Frikin’ Awesome Apps (without AppData)

In GNOME Software, we show a list of applications for each category that we think are frikin’ awesome. Some have AppData, and some don’t. For the ones that don’t yet have AppData it leaves the responsibility of writing the long description to the Linux community, where we can push the data back to upstream so that all the distributions can benefit. So far we’ve had a superb reaction from lots of upstream projects.

For Fedora 20 we want all the awesome apps to have AppData, so users can evaluate the application before installing it. It would add a really nice bit of polish to the whole experience. If you can spare 5 minutes and want to help, I’ve got another shared document here.

The list of awesome-but-unloved apps is: audacity, ardour2, gnome-banshee, rosegarden, sound-juicer, doom, openarena, xonotic, tremulous, btanks, frozen-bubble, quadrapassel, neverball, gnomine, wesnoth, supertuxkart, redeclipse, lyx, gparted, virt-manager, eclipse, gitg, monodevelop, blender, shotwell, octave, saoimage, workrave, celestia, polari, pidgin, chromium, pitivi, vlc and openshot. If you want to add any other apps there, please feel free, although I would much prefer the AppData file to go upstream if you’re a contributor or maintainer of a project. Remember, we can’t feature applications on the front page that don’t have AppData, so that’s an added incentive. I’d love to expose more people to blender for instance.

There’s no way I can do all this myself for Fedora 20, so I really need your help. Again. Thanks.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

13 thoughts on “Frikin’ Awesome Apps (without AppData)”

  1. Polari? My idea was to get it end-user ready in time for 3.12 (and of course include app data then) – if enough people disagree with me on its readiness, I can certainly do a pre-release with app data …

  3. So many times the tasks which need help are technical things that I cannot address. But here you ask for something I could do–add the details to a couple of software packages I love. I’m glad you put up the shout-out, so that I could add some details to some cool apps.

    1. Cool, thanks. As soon as the new release is packaged in Fedora, either the metadata will pick it up or the AppData file will be read by gnome-software. Thanks!

    1. Hey Matěj — both projects don’t seem to install the AppData file — it’s not enough to just have them in a git repo or in a tarball, it needs to be installed onto the system as well.

  9. Somewhat offtopic, but are there any plans to sync the Appdata info with package info in the various distros? Eg. Debian usually has short title, description and URL for all of its packages, sometimes even translated; and there is a repository of screenshots at http://screenshots.debian.net/.

    1. There are a few technical, stylistic and legal issues with doing this; if you read some of my previous blog posts comments I’ve covered most of that there.

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