AppCenter Spotlight: 2017 Wrap Up
Take a look back at 2017 and each Spotlight app from the year
It was just earlier this year that AppCenter debuted pay-what-you-want apps to elementary OS, and it’s been a great year for apps.
After looking at the apps helping us beta test AppCenter in April and May, each month we focused in on a high-quality app, interviewed its developer, and helped tell their story. Let’s review and check back in on each of those apps as we prepare for a new year!
And remember, if an app is available for purchase, you can always pay more than the asking price to wish the developer an extra happy holiday season. ;)
Beta Testers
This batch of apps was the very first to go through AppCenter Dashboard and get into the hands of beta testers. They helped us iron out any submission and automated testing issues as well as provided feedback for how we could make AppCenter Dashboard even better.
Read the original story from April
Vocal
Vocal was introduced as “one of the largest and most complex apps” we had tested in April, and that remains true to this day. It’s a truly impressive podcast app with iTunes store integration, streaming and downloading, audio and video support, and more. It’s been downloaded over 6,000 times so far this year.
Since April, Vocal hasn’t changed drastically. Instead, it’s had several small quality-of-life improvements, stability improvements, and bug fixes. For example, images are now perfectly crisp in HiDPI, there have been a few minor visual tweaks, and episode summaries are now better supported.
Something that stood out to me in looking at Vocal’s progression is the amount of community development; while it’s primarily developed and maintained by Nathan Dyer from Needle & Thread, several of the recent commits are from others who found the source code on GitHub and wanted to help make it better.
Get Vocal on AppCenter for the suggested price of $5.
Spice-Up
I introduced Spice-Up as a mockup turned into a beautiful app, but it’s matured into so much more. However, it got its own Spotlight, so we’ll get back to it further down.
Tomato
Tomato is a pomodoro-technique timer designed to help you manage your work and breaks. It’s been downloaded over 7,000 times this year.
Since its first release to AppCenter, it’s has actually been redesigned to look even simpler and lighter-weight.
It’s now a flat dialog style colored edge-to-edge with the relevant theme color: neutral slate to start, ripe tomato red for working, and a nice deep green for relaxing on breaks. The shades were even updated to be a little higher-contrast, which is nice.
Get Tomato on AppCenter for free.
Notes-Up
Notes-Up is a writing notebook with Markdown support, and it’s gotten several updates since our post in April. It’s been downloaded over 20,000 times this year.
Soon after our post, developer Felipe Escoto added a handy interactive help sidebar to learn and reference Markdown. It’s a super nice touch. He also added spell check, fixed bugs, improved translations, and made some minor UI improvements.
Get Notes-Up on AppCenter for free.
Eddy
Eddy by developer Adam Bieńkowski is a Debian package installer for devs or anyone installing .deb files. It’s been downloaded over 90,000 times this year.
Since its debut, it’s also had a handful of releases with new translations, annoyance-fixes, UI updates, support for other packaging formats, and more.
Eddy was also chosen by System76 to ship with Pop!_OS as its default .deb installer. Congrats, Adam!
Get Eddy on AppCenter for free.
More Beta Testers
In May I looked at four “category-defining” apps from the AppCenter beta—each was the first of its type in AppCenter and helped set the bar for apps to come.
Read the original story from May
Bookworm
Bookworm was an app I was following on Google+, and was happy to see land during the second phase of the beta. It’s been downloaded over 10,000 times this year.
Bookworm was fairly full-featured when it debuted, but developer Siddhartha Das has been busy adding features ever since. It now sports PDF and .mobi (Kindle) book support, comic format support, fullscreen mode, reading preferences (like line spacing and color schemes), a new list view for better management, annotations, and more keyboard shortcuts. Along the way he’s added a handful of other UI improvements and bugfixes.
Get Bookworm on AppCenter for free.
Nimbus
Nimbus is a cute little weather applet from Daniel Foré. It’s been downloaded over 7,000 times this year.
Since its debut in May, Dan has updated Nimbus with a new layout, click-and-drag from anywhere on the applet, and Spanish translations.
Get Nimbus on AppCenter for the suggested price of $1.
NaSC
Peter Arnold’s awesome intelligent calculator made a splash when it landed in AppCenter in May. It’s been downloaded over 10,000 times this year.
Since then, Peter has added inline comment support and fixed a handful of bugs. While it might not sound like much has been added since its release, remember that the app had been around for a few years before AppCenter and is feature-packed. I highly recommend buying it; it’ll become your new go-to calculator, homework helper, and statistics friend.
Get NaSC on AppCenter for the suggested price of $1.
Hourglass
Sam Thomas’s Hourglass is a combo alarm clock, stopwatch, and timer app that we covered in May. It’s been downloaded over 4,000 times this year.
Hourglass hasn’t changed significantly, but it’s had a handful of bugfixes and translations pushed out since its release.
Get Hourglass on AppCenter for free.
Agenda
Dane Henson’s to-do app Agenda was the first standalone app in the monthly Spotlight series, and it helped set the tone for each month to come. It’s been downloaded over 9,000 times this year.
Since the spotlight, Dane has pushed out a few minor releases with bug fixes, UI style changes, and a fresh new icon.
Be sure to read the original story from June and get Agenda on AppCenter for free if you haven’t checked it out!
Quilter
When I interviewed Quilter’s developer Lains in July, the app was an extremely focused and simple writing app. Since then, it’s had several major updates; it’s still focused, but it’s more featureful than ever. Quilter has been downloaded over 40,000 times this year.
Lains has pushed out a ton of releases. The most immediately obvious updates have to do with styling: Quilter now uses the typewriter-esque PT Mono font, its styling has been completely revamped to align better to the elementary color palette and make dark mode darker, and the icon has been redesigned.
But once you look a little closer, you’ll notice there’s a completely new preview mode, Markdown table support, and a statusbar with mode toggles and writing stats like words and reading time. Lains also added keyboard shortcuts, and added several preferences for the new features to the reorganized preferences dialog.
Read the original story from July and get Quilter on AppCenter for free.
Harvey
I wrote about Harvey, the contrast-checker by Daniel Foré back in August. It’s an app Dan wrote because it’s a tool he often wanted to use, and I know it’s become a staple in the toolkits of designers including myself. This year, Harvey has been downloaded over 3,000 times.
Since August, Dan has added HiDPI icons, right-to-left language support, and a handful of under-the-hood changes. Read the original story from August and get Harvey on AppCenter for the suggested price of $3.
Spice-Up
I interviewed Felipe Escoto about his presentation app Spice-Up back in September. It started as a mockup, but the design inspired Felipe to make a truly awesome app that has been downloaded over 20,000 this year.
Felipe pushed out two major updates since the Spotlight. They focused on performance optimizations, UI cleanups, a text alignment tool, new translations, and a super clever web preview for Spice-Up presentation files.
Be sure to read the original story from September and get Spice-Up on AppCenter for free.
Torrential
I took a look at David Hewitt’s torrent client Torrential in October. It’s definitely been a hit; Torrential has been downloaded over 40,000 times so far this year.
It hasn’t been long since October, but David managed to push out an update in that time with some UI tweaks, under-the-hood improvements, HiDPI icons, and updated translations. Make sure you catch the original story from October and get Torrential on AppCenter for the suggested price of $1.
Sequeler
Just last month I interviewed Alessandro Castellani and wrote about his SQL client Sequeler. It’s already been downloaded over 6,000 times this year.
Earlier this month Alessandro pushed another update with a new icon, exposed SQL errors, improved local query execution, and bug fixes. Read last month’s AppCenter Spotlight and get Sequeler on AppCenter for the suggested price of $5.
Looking forward to 2018
These monthly AppCenter Spotlights have been a blast for me, and it’s always exciting to check in on the newest released and updated apps. I look forward to continue them throughout 2018. Until then, have a great holiday season and a happy new year!
We’d like to say thanks to everyone who’s bought an app on AppCenter, our supporters on Bountysource and Patreon, and those who’ve purchased a copy of elementary OS or merch from our store. Every contribution helps make all of this possible, and we wouldn’t be here without you! If you’d like to help improve elementary OS, don’t hesitate to Get Involved!
