The judging is finished and the scores are in, we now have the winners of our third Ubuntu App Showdown! Over the course of six weeks, and using the Ubuntu SDK, our community of app developers were able to put together a number of stunningly beautiful, useful, and often highly entertaining apps.
We had everything from games to productivity tools submitted to the competition, written in QML, C++ and HTML5. Some were ports of apps that already existed on other platforms, but the vast majority were original apps created specifically for the Ubuntu platform.
Best of all, these apps are all available to download and install from the Apps Scope on Ubuntu phones and tablets, so if you have a Nexus device or one with a community image of Ubuntu, you can try these and many more for yourself. Now, on to the winners!
QML Apps: Project Dashboard
Judges were astounded by the beautifully crafted Project Dashboard app, the winner of the QML category. Not only the idea and execution were brilliant, but also the fact that it’s a convergent QML application that runs on phones, tablet and desktop got it those coveted extra points from the jury.
With Project Dashboard you can keep track of different projects you’re managing or participating right from your device, in a very intuitive and easy way. For the geeks in us who contribute in several Open Source project, the excellent integration with Github makes it a pleasure to participate or manage the day to day of projects hosted in there.
Well done Michael Spencer!
HTML5 Apps: BE Mobile
Say you’re in Belgium and want to get quickly from A to B with public transport? Then you’ll definitely want to use the winner of the HTML5 apps category: BE Mobile.
BE Mobile helps travellers find the best routes and times to travel within Belgium by selecting a journey and searching through a list of public transport services that can be enabled or disabled at will. In addition to that, a set of Twitter feeds for the services are provided, so that commuters and occasional travellers get informed in real time of disruptions and news for the lines they’re wanting to use.
What’s beautiful about it is the way in which using the SDK’s HTML5 components the app blends into the system exactly as a QML app. Convergence is also well-catered for with a responsive HTML design.
Congrats to Jelmer Prins!
Ported Apps: 2048
Whoever has been online lately has surely heard about or played 2048. This addictive game created by 19-year-old Gabriele Cirully has quicky reached Internet popularity status and quite a following. And now Ubuntu has got its own ported version thanks to developer Victor Thompson, who takes home the prize for the best ported app in this Showdown!
A simple yet beautiful UI, combined with an engaging game experience will certainly grant hours of fun trying to reach that craved for 2048 tile!
Chinese Apps: QmlTextReader and Simple Dict
Chinese apps: QmlTextReader on the left, Simple Dict on the right
As a new category, we added “Chinese apps” for this third round of the App Showdown. Boren Zhang, who is also a Core Apps developer, contributed QmlTextReader, which had a simple design as its focus. It allows you to read novels and other texts and works very well for Chinese text. Font size and encoding can be changed and you can jump to where you left the text before. Perfect for long rides on the train or bus! Shenjing Zhu submitted a simple English/Chinese dictionary which is easy to use and very straight-forward. Both apps are very useful for readers and will come in handy quite often.
Go and get them all!
With retail Ubuntu phones getting closer and closer, the third Ubuntu App Showdown Ubuntu was a good opportunity to put the Ubuntu SDK, our documentation and our general approach to apps in Ubuntu to the test. In particular our HTML5 story has evolved to be on par with QML, so thanks a lot to all community developers and the Webapps team Engineers who have made this possible. During the course of these six weeks we’ve received great feedback from our developer community, worked out a large number of bugs in the SDK, and added or plan to add many new features to our platform.
It was also great to see how quickly all the apps were published in the app store and how little time had to be spent in reviews. The great thing is: if you have a device to run Ubuntu on or use the emulator, you can very easily install all the apps and take them for a spin. Six weeks is not a long time to write an app and get it to completion, but everybody worked hard, got their app in and we are very likely going to see more updates to the apps in the coming weeks.
Once again congratulations to Boren Zhang, Jelmer Prins, Michael Spencer, Shengjing Zhu, Victor Thompson and a big thank you to everybody who participated or helped those who participated, and everyone who has worked on building the Ubuntu SDK, Click tools and the App Store. And if you’re an app developer, or want to become an app developer, now is your time to get started with the Ubuntu SDK!
谢谢 for all the submissions everyone!