Issue: How do you find the application you're looking for?

What do we need: title, icon, screenshot, comments, ratings, description.

Access rights (privileges needed for the app to run)? There's no technical solution for now anyway, so ignore it.

Categories for apps:

  • use the ones from .desktop files?
  • should we have same categorization in app menu and app store? => probably different
  • tree structure doesn't scale
  • http://www.appbrain.com/
  • http://instantwatcher.com
  • amazon
    • good thing here is the tags that are proposed after a search: they're used to split results in equal groups (and not all tags are proposed)
    • no huge list of results, but pages of results
  • tags: a defined set of common tags. No free-form. find apps per mime-types

One-level of navigation. We don't want to have deep navigation. => toplevel categories. And then, inside of this, you can filter it down: keywords. There's no real way to display all tags in a reasonable to the user anyway.

default order of apps should make sense: top 5 apps should be the 5 apps people want.

Native app vs website?

  • website enables easy sharing with other people Use software center as a basis

  • finding an app is not good at the moment

  • once you're on the page of one app, it's quite okay (not perfect) How to find apps:

  • front-page:

    • first level of categories (5-10)
    • featured apps
  • second level:
    • something at the top (featured/recommend apps)
    • then, below, list of results
    • display a small set of tags (most-used in the list of results) to help user filter?
  • search interface should not really be different from browse interface
  • the way people find apps has to be "web-like" we need a web version of the app to have it indexed by google (people look on google) is there a good reason we need a native version of the app?

Conclusion:

  • no tree view
  • get results immediately
  • 1 or 2 steps only
  • keywords
  • filtering on the result page
  • indexed by google, a link to share the app
  • web page and native client need to work together/interop
  • we can use debian tags
  • packages enhancing package X should be displayed on the page of package X (like Software Center does). Useful for plugins, addons.
  • top results are important. We want recommendations there (popular apps, related to what user has already installed, etc.)
  • add "Launch" button to app pages
  • maybe just get rid of "install button", and merge with "Launch" (ie, automatically install if needed) web site: should be shared between distros? Or per distro?

Main question: use Ubuntu Software Center + build a web site OR just build web site

share code between web interface & native interface to avoid too much duplication of efforts

keep in mind tablets. Also possibly make use of multitouch where it makes sense.