“The Ubuntu SDK preview is just over 2 months old, but we’ve already seen a lot of development starting with it. Read below for a high-level look at some of the apps that are currently being written.” Looks like a good start.
“The Ubuntu SDK preview is just over 2 months old, but we’ve already seen a lot of development starting with it. Read below for a high-level look at some of the apps that are currently being written.” Looks like a good start.
Great !!
This is an important step to get beautiful linux desktop applications.
As a a sidenote, elementary an elegant linux distribution has also its SDK (named granite/libgranite).
Quick preview for elementary : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjCN_sbc1t4
More info : http://elementaryos.org/journal/luna-beta-1-released
These are more intended for Ubuntu’s phone / tablet offerings rather than the desktop.
Also I don’t find any of those apps pretty. But then beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I’ve never really been a big fan of flat design.
I find the “flat design” more appealing than the whole opposite direction like e.g. Apple is so fond of, but aside from the looks I think Ubuntu-folks are leaning too far on the flat side of things: completely flat UI often fails to give any sort of a hint as to what elements in the UI can be interacted with and what elements are just display-only whereas applying some shadowing or gradients here and there — with care — can instantly transform the app into something that’s immediately obvious.
If nothing else Ubuntu-folks need to define a way of colouring the interactive elements differently from the rest.
Edited 2013-03-13 19:46 UTC
No… no, they’re not pretty. They’re so far the other side of “hideous” as to be beyond a joke. I mean, the rage around Ubuntu lately has been a bit over the top, but really, this is *not* a good advertisement for their new toolkit…
Granite isn’t the SDK for Elementary, it is part of their particular API’s, which collective can be called an SDK if you’re so inclined: http://www.elementaryos.org/docs/api. More correctly, this set would be the SDK though: http://www.elementaryos.org/developer/tech.
Granite gives some random things which the developers got sick of implementing in GTK + Vala afaict. Either way, it is unrelated to this article.