As we come to the end of 2014, looking forward to new devices running Ubuntu in our immediate future, it’s time for one last set of Hack Days of the year.
Next week, from Monday 8th December till Friday 12th we’re going to be having another set of Core Apps Hack Days. We’ve had a few of these this year which have been a great way to focus attention on specific applications and their dependent components in the platform. They’re also a nice gateway for getting new people into the Core Apps project and Ubuntu development in general.
The Core Apps are community maintained Free Software applications which were created for Ubuntu devices, but also work on the Ubuntu desktop. We welcome new developers, testers, autopilot writers, artists and translators to get involved in these exciting projects.
The schedule
As with previous hack days we’re going to focus on specific apps on each day, which we run from 9:00 UTC until 21:00 UTC. In summary our schedule looks like this:-
Monday 8th – Calculator, Terminal & Clock
Tuesday 9th – File Manager & Calendar
Wednesday 10th – Music & Document Viewer – QA Day Workshop: writing tests for the core apps (18:00UTC)
Thursday 11th – Shorts & Reminders
Friday 12th – Weather & Dekko (email)
A QA treat
Creating core apps involves close coordination between developers and designers to provide the right set of features, high usability and appealing visuals. All these would be nothing without a suite of automated tests that are run to ensure the features are rock-solid and that no regressions are introduced with new development.
All core apps include Autopilot and QML tests that we are constantly expanding to increase test coverage. Writing tests for core apps is a nice way to get started contributing. All you’ll need is some Python knowledge for Autopilot tests or QML for QML tests. Our quality man, Nicholas Skaggs will be running a live video workshop on Wednesday Dec 10th, at 18:00UTC, as an on-ramp to learn how to create tests.
Join the fest
The Hack Days will be happening live at the #ubuntu-app-devel IRC channel on Freenode
The QA Workshop will be happening also live on Ubuntu On Air. You can watch the video and ask your questions on the same IRC channel.
We’ll blog more details about the apps each day next week with links to specific bugs, tasks and goals, so stay tuned!
As always we greatly appreciate all contributions to the Core Apps project during the Hack Days, but welcome community efforts all year round, so if this week doesn’t work for you, feel free to drop by #ubuntu-app-devel on Freenode any time and speak to me, popey.