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App Developer

The Ubuntu App Showdown

Welcome to the Ubuntu App Showdown, an exciting contest to create an app from scratch for Ubuntu in three weeks, and delivered in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

The best apps will win some awesome prizes from System76 and Qt including a System76 Gazelle Professional laptop and Nokia N9 phone for the gold prize, a System76 Lemur Ultra laptop and Nokia N9 phone for the silver prize and a Nokia N9 phone for the bronze prize.

After the contest the community will vote on all of the apps in the Ubuntu Software Centre and there are another three Nokia N9 phones up for grabs!

Completed entries in The Ubuntu App Showdown will be judged by our esteemed pan of judging submissions on Appearance, Stability, Platform Integration, Innovation and Scratching an Itch. The panel includes:

  • Matthew Paul Thomas – Canonical Design Team
  • Jono Bacon – Ubuntu Community Manager
  • Joey-Elijah Sneddon – OMG! Ubuntu! Founder and Chief Editor
  • David Planella – App Developer Community Liaison
  • Bhavani Shankar – Application Review Board
  • Jonathan Thomas – OpenShot Lead Developer

Participate

1

Know the rules

The rules are very simple:

  • The contest starts on the 18th of June 2012
  • You’ve got 3 weeks to develop a new app, until the 9th July 2012
  • We strongly recommend you use Quickly as it eases the development process, but you are not required to
  • You must submit the app to the Software Centre

Check out the App Showdown rules ›

2

Get started with Quickly

You can use any toolkit of choice, but we recommend Quickly to kickstart your developer experience and make things easier. Quickly puts the power of Rapid Application Development at your fingertips. Start using it and embrace its workflow:

  • Install Quickly
  • Create your app with the following command, where myapp is the name of your application: quickly create ubuntu-application myapp
  • Learn more about the Quickly workflow and read the tutorial: cd myapp; quickly tutorial
  • Are you looking for an idea for an app or want to share one? Pick one up or submit one on the UbuntuAppShowdown reddit

Get started ›

3

Learn the skills you need

Learn about Ubuntu app development ›

4

Submit your app

As the final step, you’ll get to publish your app in the Software Centre to be distributed to millions and rated and reviewed for the community vote. We ask all participants to package their apps in a Personal Package Archive (PPA), which Quickly makes really easy:

  • Set up a PPA on Launchpad
  • Run the following command to package and upload your app: quickly submitubuntu
  • Your application (1) must be published to a PPA (2) run out of /opt, (3) only have dependencies in the Ubuntu 12.04 archive, and (4) must work correctly. Fortunately Quickly eases this with the above command. If you choose not to use Quickly and you are manually packaging it, if your application does not adhere to the above points, it will be rejected.
  • IMPORTANT! While submitting your app, fill in the App Showdown Participation Details and upload it in the ‘Your application‘ field in MyApps

Submit your app ›

Prizes

Gold Prize Silver Prize Bronze Prize

System76 Gazelle Professional laptop and Nokia N9 phone

System76 Lemur Ultra laptop and Nokia N9 phone

Nokia N9 phone
Community prize: a Nokia N9 phone for each one of the top 3 apps. Those apps which have already won the jury vote (Gold, Silver or Bronze) are not eligible for the community prize!
Every submitted app also gets an Ubuntu T-Shirt!

Spread the word

Keep everyone updated by blogging about your app’s progress and post the blog entry link on Twitter with the #ubuntuappshowdown hash tag.

Be sure to send your blog entries to the UbuntuAppShowdown reddit or as a mention to @ubuntuappdev – the judges like to see your progress!

And remember to stay up to date about the latest Ubuntu App Showdown news on the app developer channels::

Questions?

Sponsors

We would like to thank the following sponsors who have kindly contributed to the awesome prizes to this contest