Ubuntu App Developer

Top 10 Ubuntu app downloads for March 2012

David Planella — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:20:52 +0000

We’re ramping up to the release of Ubuntu 12.04 and new and cool apps keep being added to the Software Centre. Check out last month’s most downloaded free and paid apps.

Top 10 paid apps

1. Steel Storm: Burning Retribution

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution marks the return of top-down shooters with new twists. The game has score oriented competitive gameplay, and is designed for people who like fast paced action, hordes of smart enemies, destructible worlds and ground shaking explosions.

2. Uplink

You play an Uplink Agent who makes a living by performing jobs for major corporations. Your tasks involve hacking into rival computer systems, stealing research data, sabotaging other companies, laundering money, erasing evidence, or framing innocent people. You use the money you earn to upgrade your computer systems, and to buy new software and tools. As your experience level increases you find more dangerous and profitable missions become available.

3. Oil Rush

Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. It combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS with the sheer fun of Tower Defence. Fight the naval war between furious armies across the boundless waters of the post-apocalyptic world.

4. Fluendo DVD Player

Fluendo DVD Player is a software application specially designed to reproduce DVD on Linux/Unix platforms, which provides end users with high quality standards.

5. Braid

Braid is a platform game in painterly style where you manipulate the flow of time to solve puzzles. Every puzzle in Braid is unique; there is no filler. Braid treats your time and attention as precious, and it does everything it can to give you a mind-expanding experience.

6. Ubuntu User

Ubuntu User is a smart, accessible journal of the Ubuntu user environment. Each issue offers a real-world glimpse at how the experts use Ubuntu in the wild. You’ll learn about Ubuntu tools for practical tasks such as working in the cloud, managing mobile devices, processing images, and making music.

7. World of Goo

Drag and drop living, squirming, talking globs of goo to build structures, bridges, cannonballs, zeppelins, and giant tongues. The millions of innocent goo balls that live in the beautiful World of Goo are curious to explore. But they don’t know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious. The most addicting and awe-inspiring puzzle game will set you on an adventure that you’ll never forget!

8. DEFCON

A stunning multiplayer simulation of global thermonuclear war. Take on the role of a General hidden deep within an Underground bunker. Compete against the computer or online against your friends for total world domination.

9. Family Farm

Work the farm in this game of 19th century farmsteading and build a home for your families. Clicking cows won’t earn you any cash. This is a simulation of a farmstead experienced in stories which span a generation. Keep them fed, develop their skills, and grow their land in to a Family Farm!

10. Linux Format Magazine

Issue 156 (April) of Linux Format magazine – now on the Ubuntu Software Centre. We’re wildly excited about the Raspberry Pi, and you should be too. It’s a full, working PC, it runs Linux and it costs just $25. It’s not Windows 8-certified, but it’s going to change the way the world thinks about computing.

Top 10 free apps

1. Ryzom

Ryzom, one of the best role playing Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the moment (MMORPG), is set more than 2000 years in the future, on a living, evolving world: beautiful Atys!

2. Full Circle Magazine

Full Circle is a free, independent, monthly magazine dedicated to the Ubuntu family of Linux operating systems. Each month, it contains helpful how-to articles and reader submitted stories. Full Circle also features a companion podcast, the Full Circle Podcast, which covers the magazine along with other news of interest.

3. Crossover Games

Play Windows games like World of Warcraft on Ubuntu! CrossOver Games (Ubuntu Edition) makes it possible to play Windows games such as World of Warcraft and many others. CrossOver Games is built on the latest versions of Wine, based on contributions from both CodeWeavers and the open-source Wine community. CrossOver Games aims to bring you the latest, greatest, bleeding edge improvements in Wine technology.

4. CrossOver Pro (Trial)

CrossOver Linux allows you to install many popular Windows productivity applications, plugins and games in Linux. You can think of it as an emulator, but it’s different, because there’s no Windows OS license required. Your applications integrate seamlessly with your GNOME or KDE environment. It’s like running Windows on your Linux machine, but without Windows.

5. Vendetta Online

Vendetta Online is a 3D space combat MMORPG. This MMO permits thousands of players to interact as the pilots of spaceships in a vast universe. Users may build their characters in any direction they desire, becoming rich captains of industry, military heroes, or outlaws.

6. Marble Arena 2

Free, physics based, 3D marble game, featuring vibrant HD graphics, fun and addictive star zapping gameplay, and an easy to use built-in editor for creating custom levels.

7. CoreBreach Demo

CoreBreach is an anti-gravity racing game with combat-based gameplay. Its unique graphic style, with a cell-shaded look, sets up a very futuristic atmosphere with a wide range of choices for ships, race tracks and powerful weapons.

8. PDF Studio 7 Demo

Demo version of PDF Editor to evaluate both PDF Studio 7 Standard and PDF Studio 7 Pro and will add a watermark to the documents saved.

9. Tribal Trouble 2

Tribal Trouble 2 is a browser-based RTS game that takes place in the zany age of the Vikings. You are the Chief of a Viking tribe and are responsible for making a name for yourself by conquest and skill.

10. Manager

Manager is free accounting software for Ubuntu. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with modules such as cashbook, invoicing, receivables, payables, taxes and comprehensive financial reports.

Your app in Ubuntu

Would you like to see your app featured in this list and on millions of user’s computers? It’s a lot easier than you think:

If you’re just getting your feet wet, check out how to get started with your first app in Ubuntu ›
If you’ve got an existing app you’d like deliver to the world, submit it to the Ubuntu Software Centre ›

Notes:

The lists of top 10 app downloads includes only those applications submitted through My Apps on the Ubuntu App Developer Site. For more information about of usage of other applications in the Ubuntu archive, check out the Ubuntu Popularity Contest statistics.
The top 10 free apps list contains gratis applications that are distributed under different types of licence, some of which might not be open source. For detailed licence information, please check each application’s description in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Follow Ubuntu App Development on:

Social Media Icons by Paul Robert Lloyd

How to create a Wikipedia Unity lens for Ubuntu

David Callé — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:25:07 +0000

The Unity Dash provides a lightweight, instant and easy means to browse and retrieve interesting content. Through the use of lenses, it enables the user to search for information both locally and remotely. In this article you’ll learn how to easily write a lens to comfortably search the Wikipedia right from your desktop.

Requirements

To follow this tutorial, you’ll need the following:

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – get Ubuntu ›
Quickly – install quickly ›
Quickly Lens Template – install the Quickly Lens Template ›

Writing a Wikipedia Unity Lens

Making a lens begins with a simple step to set up the project. Fire up a terminal by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+T key combo, where you can type the commands below.

Create the project

quickly create unity-lens wikipedia
cd wikipedia

Now, let’s code!

quickly edit

This command will open three files in your favourite editor, the one we are going to edit is __init__.py

The first interesting thing you can see here, is the Meta class. It defines the behaviour of the lens :

class Meta:
    name = 'Wikipedia'
    description = 'Wikipedia Lens'
    search_hint = 'Search Wikipedia'
    icon = 'wikipedia.svg'
    search_on_blank=True

Most of the time, when you make a simple lens, you don’t need to change anything here and in our case, we won’t.

A lens needs categories, which are used to visually separate different types of results. For Wikipedia, we only need one category, and we are going to name it “Articles”.

Below the Meta class, we see this line of code:

example_category = ListViewCategory("Examples", 'help')

We are going to modify it to suit our needs

First, we rename the variable to articles_category, for the sake of clarity
Then, we have to choose between ListView and IconView, which are different ways of presenting the results inside a category. Let’s keep the default: ListView
We also need to give our category a display name: Articles
Finally, we need a decent icon for the category header, and we will choose a stock item from the system: dialog-information-symbolic

articles_category = ListViewCategory("Articles", "dialog-information-symbolic")

Now that we have the architecture of our lens ready, we are going to add what a lens is supposed to do: searching. The default code illustrates how to add results to a lens…

def search(self, search, results):
    # TODO: Add your search results
    results.append('https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/Lenses/Singlet',
                'ubuntu-logo',
                self.example_category,
                "text/html",
                'Learn More',
                'Find out how to write your Unity Lens',
                'https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/Lenses/Singlet')
    pass

…but what we want is to ask results to Wikipedia.

Searching on Wikipedia

Let’s create a new function to search Wikipedia, that we will plug into this one.

We name it wikipedia_query, which sounds appropriate. It will take the string typed by the user in the search bar as an argument. We are also going to need a few Python modules to do the search: urllib2 to do the HTTP call and simplejson to parse the data delivered by Wikipedia.

At the top of the file, with all the other import, we import the modules we need:

import urllib2
import simplejson

Then, inside the WikipediaLens(SingleScopeLens) class, our main class, we add a wiki variable, which will help to simplify the code:

wiki = "http://en.wikipedia.org"

And we create our function :

def wikipedia_query(self, search):

search, is the string typed by the user in the search bar. We need to change it a little before sending it to Wikipedia, by replacing blank spaces with | , as it’s the way Wikipedia understands queries.

search = search.replace(" ", "|")

We now create our query url, using the Wikipedia opensearch API

url = ("%s/w/api.php?action=opensearch&limit=25&format=json&search=%s" % (self.wiki, search))

And we store our returned results in a results variable, they are in json, so we use the simplejson module to turn them into a list.

results = simplejson.loads(urllib2.urlopen(url).read())

We also add a debug line, to show what we are doing.

print "Searching Wikipedia for %s" % (search)

And we finish our work on this function by making it return something.

return results[1]

Our wikipedia_query function should look like this, or almost, as I’ve added a try and an except, to catch eventual errors (network error, results error, etc.). If there is one, it will print an informative debug message and return an empty list of results.

def wikipedia_query(self,search):
    try:
        search = search.replace(" ", "|")
        url = ("%s/w/api.php?action=opensearch&limit=25&format=json&search=%s" % (self.wiki, search))
        results = simplejson.loads(urllib2.urlopen(url).read())
        print "Searching Wikipedia"
        return results[1]
    except (IOError, KeyError, urllib2.URLError, urllib2.HTTPError, simplejson.JSONDecodeError):
        print "Error : Unable to search Wikipedia"
        return []

Next, all we need to do is plugging this new function into our existing search function

def search(self, search, results):
    for article in self.wikipedia_query(search):
        results.append("%s/wiki/%s" % (self.wiki, article),
                    "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Wikipedia-logo.png",
                    self.articles_category,
                    "text/html",
                    article,
                    "Wikipedia Article",
                    "%s/wiki/%s" % (self.wiki, article))
    pass

Which can be translated as: for each result returned by wikipedia_query, add an article to the lens.
What happens in results.append is really important to understand what we can display in a lens. Here is what we need to pass to Unity for each result:

results.append (url,
            icon,
            category,
            mime-type,
            text,
            comment,
            drag and drop url)

That’s it, your lens is done.

Using the Wikipedia Lens

You can now make it visible in the Dash by typing the following command on the terminal:

sudo quickly install

and run it with

quickly run

It does what it’s supposed to, which is great, but we are going to make it a bit nicer…

Making it nicer

First, the way of displaying results is not appropriate for Wiki results, we don’t need to see “Wikipedia Article” on each one. Let’s change the category to use the IconView:

articles_category = IconViewCategory("Articles", "dialog-information-symbolic")

Then, you may have noticed that it only returns English results, which is fine… if you assume that all your users will speak English. Let’s try to improve this by finding out the user’s session language and ask Wikipedia for this language only.

At the top of our file we need to add a new import : the locale module.

import locale

Then, inside our main class, above the wiki variable, we need to find the user’s locale :

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_MESSAGES, '')
loc = locale.getlocale(locale.LC_MESSAGES)[0].split("_")[0]

loc is now a variable containing a string like “en”, “fr”, “de”, etc.

We modify our wiki variable to use loc.

wiki = "http://%s.wikipedia.org" % (loc)

And if we run our lens again…

Localized results in your language, as expected from an OS for human beings

Conclusion

This tutorial demonstrated how to easily create lens for the Unity dash to enrich the Ubuntu user experience and provide the ability to search on the wikipedia right from the desktop.

Learn more

Learn more about Unity and related technologies
Learn more about Unity lenses and scopes
Unity API reference
Wikipedia opensearch API
For reference, here is the default lens template you will find when opening __init__.py, and here is the finished lens made with this tutorial.
10 of the best Unity Lenses & Scopes for Ubuntu (via OMG!Ubuntu)

Questions?

If you’ve got any questions on this tutorial, or on the technologies that it uses, just ask on Askubuntu!

Oh, and don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comments!

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Ubuntu Software Center: Run, jump, thermonuclear war and more!

John Pugh — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 03:50:44 +0000

The past month brought a lot of new applications. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

And Yet it Moves

Run, jump, and turn the world upside down
Imagine the press of a button would tilt the world, turning walls into floors, slides into platforms, and stacks of rocks into dangerous hazards. And Yet It Moves is an award-winning physics-based platform game in which you rotate the game world at will to solve challenging puzzles. Navigate through a paper collage world created with colorful pieces of cardboard and set to distinctive music.
With three different environments and multiple game modes, And Yet It Moves is a platformer that will provide you with endless challenges. Turn your world upside-down with And Yet it Moves!

DEFCON

Everyone Dies!
Introversion Software presents DEFCON, a stunning multiplayer simulation of global thermonuclear war. Take on the role of a General hidden deep within an Underground bunker. Compete against the computer or online against your friends for total world domination. Start by launching battleships, subs and bombers in order to decimate your opponents defences. Scramble together your alliances but remember only one can stand victorious. Prepare your pre-emptive strike before one of your supposed allies gets the same idea. Choose the perfect moment to obliterate your opponents with an apocalyptic thermonuclear barrage, but get it wrong, and their devastating counter attack will bring you to your knees!
Its Global Thermonuclear War, and nobody wins. But maybe – just maybe – you can lose the least.

Multiwinia

Stickman slaughter!
Long ago a computer scientist called Dr Sepulveda created a beautiful digital world existing entirely within a computer network of his own invention. This world was called Darwinia and it was inhabited by a peaceful, law-abiding digital life-form called the Darwinians. As the years wore on the Darwinians became ever more aggressive. They divided into factions, squabbling over Darwinia’s limited natural resources. Tribes began to roam the fractal voids hell bent on each other’s destruction, drunk on power and unswerving in the pursuit of world supremacy. Far and wide, they became known as the Multiwinians…. Welcome to Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest – the ultimate retro-arcade multiplayer experience! Choose from a selection of six spectacular, action-packed game modes, set in one of the most beautiful game environs you will ever set eyes on.
Challenge your opponent to a game of stick-man slaughter, and watch digital-war unfold, as your Multiwinian army struggles to complete a chosen task faster and better than your rival’s. It’s fast, it’s furious, and only the flattest will survive!

MindLabyrinth

Retro puzzle game!
MindLabyrinth is a game where you control an old mayan avatar and must solve puzzles to reach Patchamama’s hidden temple. The game is clearly a retro puzzling but it offers as a bonus a unique support for NeuroSky’s MindWave headset – if you own it – to read your brain signals and interpret them. With its retro graphics and old-school mechanisms the game will delight casual as well as old-school gamers. The game itself is linear. You progress through a series of 52 levels of increasing difficulty.
And if you own the Mindwave headset, you will have to actually use your brain to make stones move, gears work, etc…
The game will even ask you to achieve a meditative state to recover health.
So if you want to have casual brain fun (yeah… it sounds weird;) ) get the game and see for yourself.

Nanoparticles

Enter the world of particle physics!

The survival of the green charge is in your hands. The purple charges will destroy the green one when touched, so you’ll have to keep them away from each other. Behind the scenes are the laws of physics at work. Coulomb’s law predicts the movement of each particle, with some modifications for the sake of entertainment, of course. You can push around the green charge using the red charges to repel it and the blue charges attract it.

PDF Studio 7

Powerful, easy to use PDF tool!

PDF Studio is a powerful, easy to use PDF editor that provides a large number of functions on PDF documents at a fraction of the cost of Adobe® Acrobat®. PDF Studio maintains full compatibility with the PDF Standard.
With PDF Studio you can review and annotate documents, Scan-To-PDF, fill in and save PDF forms, secure documents with passwords and permissions, merge/split/assemble documents, and add bookmarks/watermarks/headers/footers. PDF Studio 7 is also integrated with Google Apps™ document services.

Sukaro

Kakuro number puzzle game!

Kakuro, the Japanese number puzzle game for one player. An excellent exercise for your brain! Includes an unlimited amount of puzzles available in various sizes ranging from 5×5 to 16×16.

Get your game on. Check out these and more titles in the Ubuntu Software Center.

Top 10 Ubuntu app downloads for February 2012

David Planella — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:50:39 +0000

These were last month’s most downloaded free and paid apps in from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Top 10 paid apps

1. Oil Rush

2. Fluendo DVD Player

Fluendo DVD Player is a software application specially designed to reproduce DVD on Linux/Unix platforms, which provides end users with high quality standards.

3. CoreBreach

4. Braid

5. And Yet It Moves

And Yet It Moves is an award-winning physics-based platform game in which you rotate the game world at will to solve challenging puzzles. Navigate through a paper collage world created with colorful pieces of cardboard and set to distinctive music. With three different environments and multiple game modes, And Yet It Moves is a platformer that will provide you with endless challenges.

6. Fluendo Complete Playback Pack

Plug-ins which allow you to play certain proprietary audio and video formats. These plug-ins are not included in the default Ubuntu distribution because they are not free software.

7. Uplink

8. World of Goo

9. Steel Storm: Burning Retribution

10. TRAUMA

TRAUMA is a game that tells a story of a young woman who survives a car accident. Recovering at the hospital, she has dreams that shed light on different aspects of her identity – such as the way she deals with the loss of her parents. TRAUMA lets you experience those dreams in an interactive way, reminiscent of Point-and-Click Adventure Games.

Top 10 free apps

1. Ryzom

Ryzom, one of the best role playing Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the moment (MMORPG), is set more than 2000 years in the future, on a living, evolving world: beautiful Atys!

2. CoreBreach Demo

3. Crossover Games

4. Full Circle Magazine

5. Marble Arena 2

Free, physics based, 3D marble game, featuring vibrant HD graphics, fun and addictive star zapping gameplay, and an easy to use built-in editor for creating custom levels.

6. TreeSheets

The ultimate replacement for spreadsheets, mind mappers, outliners, PIMs, text editors and small databases. Suitable for any kind of data organization, such as Todo lists, calendars, project management, brainstorming, organizing ideas, planning, requirements gathering, presentation of information, etc.

7. Vendetta Online

8. CrossOver Pro (Trial)

9. Tribal Trouble 2

10. WireframeSketcher Studio (Trial)

WireframeSketcher is a software tool that helps product managers, designers and developers quickly create wireframes, mockups and prototypes for desktop, web and mobile applications. It’s standalone software and a plug-in for any Eclipse IDE.

Notes:

The lists of top 10 app downloads includes only those applications submitted through My Apps on the Ubuntu App Developer Site. For more information about of usage of other applications in the Ubuntu archive, check out the Ubuntu Popularity Contest statistics.
The top 10 free apps list contains gratis applications that are distributed under different types of licence, some of which might not be open source. For detailed licence information, please check each application’s description in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Follow Ubuntu App Development on:

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How To: preparing an application for submission to the Ubuntu Software Centre

David Pitkin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:34:31 +0000

Making application submissions and publishing easier for developers is knowing how to package your software for the Ubuntu Software Center. One of greatest things about Ubuntu is the simplicity and reliability of installing software with Debian packages and apt. Ubuntu uses the same system to deliver software through the Ubuntu Software Center. The packaging tools described below were written for Debian developers working and integrating upstream Linux projects. Some parts can be tricky and many developers are working hard to automate most of your packaging experience with a new service aptly named pkgme. However, that service is not quite ready today so please read on!

Debian and Ubuntu organize software into packages. These packages have a specific format which end in .deb. The .deb package is an archive that holds the binary or source of the application along with metadata describing the location to copy the application and it’s supporting files. Many different methods exist for creating Debian packages, however in the example below debhelper is our tool of choice.

The example provided is a how to step by step guide to create a Debian source package from a compiled application which will install into /opt/, add a desktop file and icon into the global menu for launching the application, and submit it for publishing under the Ubuntu App Developer Program.

Ubuntu Software Center expects all application files to be installed into /opt/. Configuration and user data files should reside in ~/.config/. With those requirements in mind, the example below has been tested and will run in /opt/ without any problems.

Prerequisites for these instructions

Ubuntu 11.10 or later.
The example application to package: download Dungeon Adventure Game › or learn more about it
Packaging tools: you can install them in Ubuntu by opening a terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T and typing the following command

sudo apt-get install devscripts build-essential lintian dh-make

Getting ready to package

Setting up the directory structure

Create the top dir. Create a directory to work in first. We want to package the Dungeon Adventure Game app, so we’ll choose a fitting name for it: dungeon – Make a directory called dungeon using mkdir dungeon
Create the packaging dir. In the new dungeon directory create another directory to place the package files you’ll be creating. The name of this directory should coincide with the version of the package using a dash between the package name and the package version. The resulting directory is dungeon/dungeon-1980.0
Create the original files dir. In the new dungeon-1980.0 directory extract the downloaded archive into a new dungeon_1980 subdirectory.

Setting up the desktop file

Now that the file structure is complete, you’ll need to create what is called a Desktop file. A desktop file contains information on how to execute an application and on its associated icon. It will enable users to see your app’s icon in the Unity Launcher and in the Unity Dash, and to launch it from there.

Desktop file. Create a file named dungeon.desktop with your text editor of choice and save it in the dungeon-1980.0 directory. Copy the content below and save it.
Icon. Create an icon named desktop.png and save it in the same dungeon-1980.0 directory. You can use the example 48 x48 pixel image below.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Name=Dungeon Adventure
Comment=Dungeon Adventure Game (a.k.a. Zork)
Icon=dungeon Exec=gnome-terminal --window -e '/opt/adventure/dungeon’
Path=/opt/dungeon
Categories=Games;

Review

You’ve just finished creating the directory layout and file needed for the packaging tools to work. After having followed the steps above, your file structure should look like this:

Now onto the fun stuff: actually packaging your app.

Packaging fun: debianizing the package

Create the package control files. In the dungeon/dungeon-1980.0/ directory run dh_make -n (for our example we will build as a native package hence the -n option). The dh_make command will create the debian directory and populate the example templates. At the prompt for the Type of package, select s for Single binary. Now change into the debian directory.
Remove unnecessary files. For this application, in the debian directory remove all files with the .ex and .EX extensions and all README.* files as they are not needed for the native application being built.
Create the installation script. During installation of the application the files need to be copied into the /opt/dungeon directory. Edit (create a new file) dungeon/dungeon-1980.0/debian/install adding the lines below to place the files in their proper location during installation.

dungeon_1980/* opt/dungeon
dungeon.desktop usr/share/applications
dungeon.png usr/share/icons/dungeon.png

Now you are ready to build the package

Packaging fun: building the package

Update the changelog. Ensure you are in the dungeon/dungeon-1980.0/ directory and run dch to update the changelog. For an intial release you can simply have one entry that shows * Initial Release along with your name and email address. The package name at the top of the changelog should be “dungeon (1980.0)”
Build the binary package. From the dungeon/dungeon-1980.0 directory run debuild -b to build the binary package. This will create a number of lintian (lintian is a sanity check tool for the package) errors. Disregard them for this example, but do fix these errors in your real submission.
Check out the output. The output is a file named dungeon_1980.0_i386.deb (if a amd64 app was being created the extension will have _amd64.deb)
Install and verify the binary package. In order to verify the build worked run sudo dpkg -i dungeon_1980.0_i386.deb to install the .deb built in the previous step, check the files are all where we expected them (/opt/dungeon, /usr/share/applications) and run the Dungeon Adventure by clicking on the Dash icon and typing Dungeon to show the icon for the app. Don’t get distracted here – this game is addictive.
Remove the binary package. Once the install is verified remove the installed package (if you wish) using dpkg --purge dungeon
Create the source package. The final step is to create the Debian source package for submission via MyApps. cd to the dungeon/dungeon-1980.0 directory and run debuild -S the -S is for source package and creates a .dsc file (among others).
Archive the source package. Provided no errors appeared in the build process tar up the files found in the dungeon/ directory as the Debian source tar cxf dungeon-1980.0-debsrc.tar.gz *.dsc *.changes *.tar.gz from the working directory (dungeon/)
Submit to MyApps. That’s it! Submit the debian source package tar created in step 7 to our Developer Program or MyApps!

Follow us on Twitter @ubuntuappdev and give us feedback!

Additional resources

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Top 10 Ubuntu app downloads for January 2012

David Planella — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:14:00 +0000

Top 10 commercial apps

1. TRAUMA

2. Oil Rush

3. Fluendo DVD Player

Fluendo DVD Player is a software application specially designed to reproduce DVD on Linux/Unix platforms, which provides end users with high quality standards.

4. Family Farm

5. Steel Storm: Burning Retribution

6. Braid

7. Monster RPG 2

Monster RPG 2 is a fantasy quest that spans continents and worlds and lets you take a simple villager and develop her into a hero with the power to save her world. The next instalment in the classic Monster RPG series, Monster RPG 2 is a turn-based role-playing game with great variety of plot twists, secrets, and scenery.

8. World of Goo

9. The Clockwork Man: The Hidden World

Explore a Victorian era filled with wondrous contraptions and fascinating machinery. Embark on a steam-powered, rollercoaster journey through land, air, and water in this unique Hidden Object Adventure! Miranda and Sprocket are back! Join them in their new adventures and discover the Hidden World, a land lost in time and glimpsed through legends.

10. Uplink

Top 10 free apps

1. Marble Arena 2

Free, physics based, 3D marble game, featuring vibrant HD graphics, fun and addictive star zapping gameplay, and an easy to use built-in editor for creating custom levels.

2. Ryzom

Ryzom, one of the best role playing Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the moment (MMORPG), is set more than 2000 years in the future, on a living, evolving world: beautiful Atys!

3. Crossover Games

4. Tribal Trouble 2

5. CoreBreach Demo

6. Full Circle Magazine

7. Vendetta Online

8. TreeSheets

9. CrossOver Pro (Trial)

10. Wunderlist

Free cloud-sync task manager, helps sharing your To-Do lists with friends and colleagues. Manage your to-dos and synchronize them with your free Wunderlist account. View and modify your tasks on Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch, Android and the Web. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide use Wunderlist everyday. Wunderlist – your tasks anywhere, anytime.

Notes:

The lists of top 10 app downloads includes only those applications submitted through My Apps on the Ubuntu App Developer Site. For more information about of usage of other applications in the Ubuntu archive, check out the Ubuntu Popularity Contest statistics.
The top 10 free apps list contains gratis applications that are distributed under different types of licence, some of which might not be open source. For detailed licence information, please check each application’s description in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Follow Ubuntu App Development on:

Social Media Icons by Paul Robert Lloyd

Ubuntu Developer Week starts today

David Planella — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:29:03 +0000

Would you like to learn how a completely free operating system is put together? Are you excited about the cool open technologies used to build Free Software? Or about the vibrant community that makes it all possible?

Learn all about developing Ubuntu

If your answer to any of the questions was a loud yes, then we’ve got a special treat for you. Today marks the start of a new edition of the Ubuntu Developer Week, a 3-day-long event packed with talks from members of the Ubuntu community presenting a wide range of topics about developing our favourite OS.

There will be talks and subjects for all levels of expertise, so whether you’ve already been involved in Ubuntu Development or you are just getting your feet wet, you’ll definitely find interesting sessions to follow and something new to learn.

It’ll be fun, join the Ubuntu Developer Week!

Also for app developers

We’ll also have content relevant to third-party app developers, in particular the session on Wednesday Feb 1st, at 15:00UTC about bringing your apps to Ubuntu: a short intro on how app developers can submit and publish their applications to Ubuntu and distribute them in the Software Centre, with a Q+A session where anyone will be able to ask their questions about authoring and publishing apps in Ubuntu.

Learn more about it on the Ubuntu Developer Week official announcement.

Additional resources

Come to the first UDW day today and join the fun!

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Featured Ubuntu Software Centre apps for January 2012

David Planella — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:22:57 +0000

We’re back with a new edition of the featured apps in the Ubuntu Software Centre. The theme this month is going to be gaming, and for this we’ve carefully hand-picked and brought you 3 of the coolest, slickest games now available in Ubuntu. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

Core Breach

Its intuitive controls support common types of steering wheels and game pads to enjoy the full driving experience directly from your computer.

And Yet it Moves

And Yet It Moves is an award-winning physics-based platform game in which players rotate the game world at will to solve challenging puzzles. Tilting the world turns walls into floors, slides into platforms, and stacks of rocks into dangerous hazards.

Players navigate through a paper collage world created with colorful pieces of cardboard and set to distinctive music. With four different environments and unlockable modes, And Yet It Moves is a platformer that will provide gamers with endless challenges.

Oil Rush

Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. It combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS with the sheer fun of Tower Defence.

Fight the naval war between furious armies across the boundless waters of the post-apocalyptic world. Pump the ever-so-precious black gold by oil rigs, capture platforms and destroy the enemy in the sea and in the air. Be ingenious to unlock super technologies and quick to send your squads straight into the heat of the battle!

Want your app to be featured next?

So are you a developer and would like your app to be featured in the Ubuntu Software Centre and available to millions of Ubuntu users? Well, nothing easier than that, then: head up to the Ubuntu App Developer site and get your app published in 6 easy steps ›.

We’re confident these cool games will keep you busy until the next featured apps post!

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Top 10 Ubuntu Software Centre app downloads for December 2011

David Planella — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:25:58 +0000

Another month and another fresh ranking for you. Into the new year and time for recap of the top 10 list of apps downloaded from the Ubuntu Software Centre last month!

Top 10 commercial apps

1 > TRAUMA

2 > Fluendo DVD Player

Fluendo DVD Player is a software application specially designed to reproduce DVD on Linux/Unix platforms, which provides end users with high quality standards.

3 > Braid

4 > Oil Rush (pre-order, beta access)

5 > Steel Storm: Burning Retribution

6 > World of Goo

7 > Monster RPG 2

8 > The Clockwork Man: The Hidden World

9 > Uplink

10 > Memory Owl

Memory Owl is a unique, dynamic game that uses physics engine and adds multiple hurdles and helpers to spice up the classic game of finding pairs of pictures. It’s suitable for all ages – even children as young as 4 years will find it amusing (especially on easy diffuculty setting). Find all pairs before they drawn in the rising water or are pushed out of screen by fish.

Top 10 free apps

1 > Ryzom

Ryzom, one of the best role playing Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the moment (MMORPG), is set more than 2000 years in the future, on a living, evolving world: beautiful Atys!

2 > Crossover Games

3 > Vendetta Online

4 > CrossOver Pro (Trial)

5 > Full Circle Magazine

6 > CrossOver Standard (Trial)

7 > Wunderlist

8 > Tribal Trouble 2

9 > Magic 8 Ball

Ask the Magic Eight Ball and get an answer to your question. If you’re looking for advice or fancy some fortune-telling, the ball will always listen to you and deliver, though it might not be what you expect!

10 > Clipardo (demo)

This program enables you to find clipart pictures by a hand-drawn sketch. It can be of service when looking for clipart for your presentations, mind maps, posters, charts, web-design, even programs.

Notes:

The lists of top 10 app downloads includes only those applications submitted through My Apps on the Ubuntu App Developer Site. For more information about of usage of other applications in the Ubuntu archive, check out the Ubuntu Popularity Contest statistics.
The top 10 free apps list contains gratis applications that are distributed under different types of licence, some of which might not be open source. For detailed licence information, please check each application’s description in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

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PayPal support lands on the Ubuntu Software Centre

David Planella — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:21:35 +0000

Support for PayPal as an additional payment option has landed today in Ubuntu Pay, the service that handles electronic payment for commercial apps in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

This new feature will enable Ubuntu users to comfortably and safely buy commercial apps, ebooks and magazines from the Software Centre with their PayPal account. PayPal will be an additional payment option along with the already supported credit and debit card alternatives, “a frequently-requested option by users who don’t have credit/debit cards or who get charged conversion fees by their bank for non-local currency transactions“, adds Stuart Metcalfe, Canonical ISD manager.

All in all, a much welcomed feature that will contribute reinforcing the virtuous circle of the Ubuntu apps ecosystem with an easier purchasing process, more profits for app authors and increased attractiveness of Ubuntu as a target platform for app developers.

Congratulations to the Canonical ISD team for this great addition to the Software Centre!

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