The final round of the Ubuntu App Showdown has now started, enabling the community to vote for their apps and giving yet another opportunity to participants to win some cool prizes.
We’re excited to announce the start of the Community Vote as the final wrap-up for the Ubuntu App Showdown. During the 2-week voting period, any individual can review and rate any of the applications submitted for the contest, giving the winners of the 3 highest rated apps the chance to win a Nokia N9 smartphone each, and the recognition their awesome apps deserve.
How voting works
It’s quite simple:
- You’ve got 2 weeks to cast your vote, until Wed 29th of August 2012
- App authors are allowed to do any changes to their app during the voting period
- Install the apps you want to review and rate. Take me to the list of apps >
- Go to the judging sheet and follow the instructions. Take me to the judging sheet >
- You can go back to the judging sheet any time and change and complete your ratings up until the time voting closes
Reviewing apps
As reviewing the huge number of contest apps for inclusion in the Software Center will still require some effort and time, we’ve decided to encourage installation from the developers PPAs. This way the technical review can happen in parallel to the voting, in the same way it was done for the Jury Vote. As an added benefit, developers can push fixes to their PPAs throughout the voting period.
You can easily install any of the contest apps from each author’s Personal Packaging Archive (PPA) by:
- Opening a terminal
- Copying and pasting the relevant command line on the INSTALLATION column for the app you want to install and pressing Enter.
At this point you’ll have installed the app, which you can invoke from the Dash to start reviewing and rating it.
Promote your app
As an app author, we encourage you to promote your app so that it gets more visibility and more votes. Here are some tips:
- Blog about your app and the cool things that it does
- Create a screencast to show off your app
- Write a high-quality article about your app and submit it to a news site
- Share the news about your app on your social accounts
- Let voters know about your app on the Ubuntu social channels:
- Be responsive to feedback and be prompt in fixing any bugs
- Complete the information about your app on the table below:
- Add a thumbnail (note: use a max width of 128px)
- Add a description
- Be creative! Think of other ways and other places to promote your app
You might also want to address the feedback judges left for your app during the jury vote.
Good luck to all participants again. Looking forward to start hearing the cool things your apps do!
Image Vintage Ad #827: It’s a Hit Out of the Park by jbcurio
