Goals And Biases
- How do various projects attract application developers?
- What does the app developer need to know?
- A snapshot of interesting points, not an immersive survey
- Things may have been missed
- All judgements are mine. Make your own!
- Sometimes comparing apples to oranges
- Concentrating on support, not technology
What Does A Developer Want?
- Strawman construction time!
- Developer already knows application purpose. Still needs
- Look and feel
- Help integration
- Internationalisation
- Accessibility
- Widget familiarity & API documentation
- Installation practices
The Holistic Challenge
- "Aargh! Where do I start?"
- What specs are supported (e.g. freedesktop.org support)?
- What tools are available?
- Which ones are compulsory?
Common Problems & Traps
- Old documentation
- For bonus problems: out of date and dateless!
- No clear path for ISV to follow from the front web page
- Being up front about lack of docs, mailing lists, etc is better
than nothing.
Programming Language Support
- Not all developers use C or C++ or Java or ...
- Bad: Forcing programmers to read C / C++ API documentation
- Good: Examples in different languages
- Good: Packaging examples
- Good: Non-trivial help and documentation usage
Providing Examples
- Trivial examples are good, up to a point
- Non-trivial examples are needed beyond a point
- Point to model real-world applications
- Comprehensive, integrated examples are useful
- Danger: bad practices perpetuate themselves once released
Getting The Word Out
- Magazine articles
- Case studies (or white papers) from successful ISV implementations
- Conference tutorials
- Pitch in a professional fashion
- Good: compare and contrast (hard; requires lots of experience)
- Bad: Dismissing the other choices
- Books
Questions?
