Worldly Tips: Ubuntu App Building Tools: Quickly & Illumination

Want to write apps on Ubuntu?  Check out the link [1] below on two great tools for writing apps on it.

Quickly [2]

There are a ton of great tools out there for Linux software developers. But it has been only recently that the level of difficulty has been greatly reduced.

The idea is to attract newbie and advanced developers into building worthwhile applications for the various distributions out there. Most successful in this space has been Ubuntu, with a new development tool called Quickly. The Quickly software builder provides Ubuntu users with access to a development tool that can easily build out software based on Python and GTK.


Illumination
[3]

Illumination Software Creator is without question easier to use than Quickly for people who have never created software. Unlike veteran software developers, newbies to the developer space haven’t the slightest idea how to lay things out so they work in a usable manner. Therefore using Illumination to “connect the dots” can do wonders to steer newbie developers away from first-time development frustrations.

I tried Quickly yesterday afternoon on my Ubuntu notebook.  Followed the video in the Ubuntu Get Started site [2] and everything went super smoothly, except for one glitch.

I hit the following error when I tried to package the app.

bzr: ERROR: Unable to determine your name.

but thanks to the askubuntu.com [4], I was able to resolve it quickly (pun intended!) with the following command.

bzr whoami "MY NAME <myemail@gmail.com>"

Replace ‘MY NAME’ with your name and ‘myemail@gmail.com’ with your email and you are good to go.

All in, it’s one of the easiest coding experience, and that includes writing GUI for a simple web browser (!)  and packaging everything into a debian package (.deb) that you can share with your friends or upload to Ubuntu Software Centre for the whole world to download!

Now all we need is for PC makers to start shipping with Ubuntu

Happy coding!

 

References

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