New: Social Applications & Linux Client
It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing the release of 2 major items: Social Applications and the client for Linux!
Social Applications
After a lot of work on both the client and website, we’re finally ready to take our application focus to another level. Social Applications allows us to start curating the application information that we have gathered from the clients that have this enabled. For one, we can give them better names, add a description of what the app does, add a category and tags, and discover similar applications.
As we have thousands of apps and discover new ones every day, curation is continuous. We’re kickstarting the process ourselves by tackling the top apps, and you can also earn credit by contributing to an application improvement. Hit the Improve button of your favorite apps and add the details for review, and you’ll be cast in stone on the application profile page as the contributor. :-)
When you submit an improvement, it goes into a review, and we’ll let you know once it’s accepted. To sweeten the pot, anyone that submits an improvement and it gets accepted can apply to get a few of these awesome stickers. We’ll do this for the foreseeable future (we’ve got a ton!), and you can find the instructions in the notification email that your submission is accepted.
The best part about the Social Applications feature are the possibilities. Expect to see the time spent in applications in your Weekly Update soon. We could also list similar applications if you’re looking for an alternative. And my favorite: we can start classifying time spent as productive, distracting, or entertaining. Stay tuned for some awesome things!
Linux Client
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, we had to pull the Linux client from our downloads because it was getting too hard to maintain and make it work on all the different Linux distributions. I posted a call for help, and help arrived! We started looking into universal packages and landed on Snapcraft. After Krzysztof Setlak and Zach Bloomquist spent months building and testing, it’s finally here! Our gratitude for them is big. :-)
The Snapcraft package is built on version 3.1, and we’ve made it so that we can easily update it whenever we release a new version. Because WhatPulse monitors your computer, we won’t be able to release it as a sandboxed snap. So, for now, it’s created with devmode, and we’ll switch to a classic snap down the road.
Our download page links to the snapcraft website; check it out! The download link and installation instructions are listed there.