Last week I was browsing the web just trying to catch up with some posts that I’d received through Twitter when I came across this from Allison Randall on the Ubuntu archives.
The main thing that jumped out at me was a reference to something called Quickly. Now I’ll admit that I don’t get to use Linux anywhere near as much as I’d like to but I do try to keep upto date with the latest goings on. However I don’t ever recall hearing about Quickly before. I must have just missed it because it appears to have been around for some time. It’s basically a framework to help speed up the development of linux applications. You can use this to create a skeleton application with a GUI including a basic menu. You can then use glade to design the user interface and python for the code behind. It’s great for getting started quickly as the name suggests.
After reading a little bit about it and running through the tutorial on Ubuntu I decided that Quickly was going to give me the ideal opportunity to remove two items from my long term todo list. First of all I’d be able to learn Python, something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and secondly I’d get to develop some free software for Ubuntu or GNU/Linux in general that I could release and maybe package up for one of the repositories.
I thought I’d start with a very simple little game which would allow me to get to grips with the whole process from start to finish. So I began by setting up my development environment. Quickly integrates very smoothly with Bazaar and Launchpad and since I already have an account there I simply created a new project on Launchpad for hosting the code, version control, bug tracking etc. The whole process was very easy and the only extra thing I had to do was to create an ssh key and add it to my profile on Launchpad so that I could upload code to the Bazaar branch.
Once I’ve completed this small project I plan to try something a bit more substantial that will be of more use to Ubuntu users and users of free software in general. But I haven’t decided exactly what that will be yet. I’ll try to post here from time to time to document my progress.