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.