Thibauld - Imagination and Execution -

Introducing allmyapps!

If you follow this blog, you probably know that, last august, I accepted to help develop freelancebusinessclub's new website. Three months later, on November 3rd, the new website was launched! Since then, after having squashed the small little bugs left, I started working on another project, my project. It's something that I've been thinking about a looooong time ago, it took me several years (really!) to mature it and, having completely recovered my technical skills, I thought it was the right time to make it become a reality.

Feeling that the market has reached a point where my project finally makes sense, I'm proud to introduce you to my new baby : allmyapps, the first linux app store designed to help users find and install new applications on their Ubuntu Linux system.

To fully understand this project, you need to know that I'm a long time Linux user and evangelist. I started using Linux in 1998 (with a slackware) while still in high school and I've always been convinced that Linux would find its way to the desktop sooner or later. There are 2 factors in particular that make me think that this time has come:

• Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth's vision is, by far, the most important point. In my opinion, the biggest reason of the Linux Desktop relative failure til now is lack of willingness from the major Linux players. Let's face it... who, today, really works to make the Linux Desktop a reality? Red Hat? They purely and simply abandonned this market. Novell? They only considers the enterprise desktop... The only company really working towards making the Linux Desktop a reality is Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth (its founder) being committed to put the Linux Desktop into everybody's hands. And it's not only words! In the past months, Canonical has hired usability experts, desktop experience engineers... and the company is really working, both technically and commercially, to make the Linux Desktop happen. Unlike everybody else, they're not waiting for the market to move but are working to make it move!
• The netbook opportunity. Did you see the laptop market last year? People are fond of netbooks: 14 millions of netbooks were sold in 2008, with around 30% of them preinstalled with Linux! For the first time, normal people (unlike you and me) are using Linux and loving it. Do not trust the rumor that says that the return rate is higher with linux netbooks as it is simply not true. Linux price and versatility is a strong asset when it comes to run machines with low spec and sell them at a low price. Netbooks are a great market opportunity for the Linux desktop! For the first time, "normal users" are buying machines with a Linux pre-installed on it.

With the rise of the netbooks, more and more users today are confronted to a linux desktop. While using the system in itself is not a problem for most users, I've experienced that people tend to have a problem when it comes to finding new applications to install on their system. On the contraty to Windows systems, Linux systems historically have a very easy, quick and reliable installation mechanism, thanks to their centralized repositories and their associated package management systems. The only drawback of this mechanism is that it is different from the one users are used to on Windows... and it's a big drawback because users are getting lost... and lost users quickly turn into angry users! And the last thing you want is your users becoming angry! With allmyapps, we want to address this very specific issue.

I will probably not be blogging much about allmyapps on this blog. If you want to follow the development of allmyapps, I advise you to subscribe to allmyapps' blog. I will continue to write posts on my personal blog (this blog), I already have a few posts waiting about web application debugging / profiling and web application performance tuning... so stay tuned!

To conclude this post, I just wanted to say that we will be attending Recked in Amsterdam on monday 26th of january (today!) and then FOSDEM in Brussels on february 6th and 7th. If you'll be there too and want to meet, just leave me a comment!