Ubuntu: The Social OS

Ubuntu needs apps. It's one of the long standing drawbacks of the otherwise great OS. Our apps just can't compete with the competition. Canonical believes it can change that by providing a Software Centre and a developer site. But i think we need to do more.

Existing Apps

Ubuntu already comes equipped with LibreOffice and has a host of other productivity apps available but the choice is lackluster at best.  Most apps appear to have been made to copy functionality from apps available on other platforms, with little focus on experience. The result is often ugly. The experience tends to be disappointing (with a few exceptions), especially to a user coming from greener pastures hoping to get the same or better out of his system for production use.

Ubuntu apps (or Linux apps in general) seem to be playing a game of copy and catch up.




Standing out from the crowd

One of the long standing reasons a lot of companies/people won’t migrate to Ubuntu is for the lack of Adobe Creative Suite or Autodesk support.  It’s sort of a Catch-22, Adobe don’t think it’s worth their while because the market share is small, the market share is small partly because of the lack of Adobe wares.  So if they won't bring the creative suite to us, we make a creative suite, one that may not initially be better from the get go but will bring some revolutionary features to the market making Ubuntu the exclusive place to get a highly productive creative app experience.

So how do we do this?

In order to attract customers to Ubuntu these features have to be baked in to the OS and accessible to any app, which would mean that even if the apps were ported to other platforms they wouldn’t get the same great experience they would get in Ubuntu.

Features:

• Online/local multi-user project collaboration
• Teams - Groups of people/contacts to make it easier to manage who works on a project
• Social device integration - Use a tablet for drawing, a laptop for typing and a TV for project overview all on the same project while still seamlessly collaborating with your team.

What you end up with is essentially a social operating system.

Apps

It would take way too long to start from scratch so i suggest either forking or rebranding and modifying existing apps.

These apps are the most important and most seemingly do-able:

• Photo Editing - GiMP is already a great photo editing tool, an updated interface and integration into the proposed features and it would be ready to go. The name is a problem though, if changing it isn't an option then we may have to fork it.
• Vector Editing - Inkscape already great and would benefit from the proposed features.
• Video Editing - Novacut would be a fantastic addition to the suite.
• Sound Editing - Audacity is the only app i’m aware of but suggestions would be appreciated. Needs a new theme.

If anyone would be willing to work on this let me know!