Ubuntu App Showdown winners announced

The winners of the Ubuntu App Showdown have been officially announced. In the end, the three-week coding challenge produced 133 applications. A jury of five Ubuntu members then picked the three winners: Lightread, Fogger and Picsaw. These three applications are already installable from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Lightread, which won the first prize of a System76 laptop and a Nokia N9 phone, is a Google Reader client written by Jono Cooper and George Czabania. The application uses a combination of HTML, CSS and Python and was written with the help of Canonical's Quickly development tool. During the App Showdown, Canonical organised several workshops to help developers get started with Quickly development. Using Quickly was also originally a condition for entering the contest, but this policy was dropped after some developers complained about having to use Python to enter.

Lightread is a clean and simple desktop client for Google Reader

The second prize, another System76 laptop, albeit with lower specifications, and an N9 phone, went to the application Fogger which enables users to turn web applications into a standalone window that can be integrated into Ubuntu's Dash application menu. The application uses a relatively simple approach to turn web sites into "applications" but does not have the offline storage and notification integration that the recently announced Ubuntu Web Apps feature offers.

Fogger turns web sites into desktop applications

Picsaw, a simple photo puzzle application, won the third prize in the contest, a Nokia N9. Picsaw takes images from the Pictures folder on an Ubuntu system and creates jigsaw puzzles that have to be solved by dragging the puzzle pieces into position with the mouse.

Picsaw creates puzzles out of the user's photos

The 130 applications that did not win a prize will now go on to another round of the contest in which the Ubuntu community picks a further three applications that will also each win N9 smartphones. Every developer who entered the contest will also receive an Ubuntu T-shirt and all of the apps will be made available from the Ubuntu Software Centre in due course.

(fab)