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  1. Blog
  2. Alan Pope
Alan Pope

Alan Pope

39 posts

Alan Pope
12 March 2021

All About That Base

Ubuntu Article

Snapcraft is our delightful tool for building snaps. It’s not the only way to build them, but it’s certainly a popular one.  A benefit of Snapcraft is that typically a developer can configure the packaging definition once, and not have to update it for a long time. Snapcraft will keep cranking out releases, via CI ...

Alan Pope
8 February 2021

Getting started with Flutter on Ubuntu

Desktop Article

This is a guest post authored by Dani Llewellyn. It was originally featured on her blog, we’re reproducing it here with Dani’s permission. Dani is an active member of the WordPress, WSL, Ubuntu and Snapcraft communities. Thanks Dani! Recently there was an announcement from Ubuntu that the desktop team are working on a replacement for ...

Alan Pope
21 January 2021

Compact and Bijou

Ubuntu Development

Snaps are designed to be self-contained packages of binaries, libraries and other assets. A snap might end up being quite bulky if the primary application it contains has many additional dependencies. This is a by-product of the snap needing to run on any Linux distribution where dependencies cannot always be expected to be installed. Thi ...

Alan Pope
7 January 2021

Time to Branch Out

Ubuntu Article

Branches are an under-used but important feature of the Snap Store publishing capabilities. Indeed as I’m writing this post, I’ve never had a need to use the feature, and I’ve been publishing snaps for four and a half years. Let’s fix that! Start with acorns The rationale for branches is simple. Each snap in the ...

Alan Pope
10 December 2020

Snaps: How we got here

Desktop Article

I’m celebrating nine years at Canonical, and coming up on 15 years since I started contributing to Ubuntu in the community. It’s been quite the ride, helping build, support and advocate for the most popular Linux desktop, and most used Linux distribution in the cloud. Over those years, we’ve strived to make it easy for ...

Alan Pope
25 September 2020

Stepping Down Gracefully

Desktop Article

The Snap Store has been designed to enable upstream developers and enthusiastic community contributors to publish snaps. As with most Linux packaging solutions, the wider community are often responsible for starting and maintaining software packages. This is a double-edged sword, especially for humans with limited life spans and other shi ...

Alan Pope
10 September 2020

Snap! Collaborate and listen!

Desktop Article

You’d think we would be running out of terrible/great (delete as applicable) 80s songs to try and shoehorn into the titles of these blog posts. Turns out, not quite yet! “How can I help?” is a phrase often used in Open Source projects by enthusiastic users and developers. There are a lot of moving parts ...

Alan Pope
25 June 2020

Split Personality Snaps

Internet of Things Article

Broadly speaking, most snaps in the Snap Store fall into one of two categories, desktop applications and server daemons. The graphical applications such as Chromium and Spotify use desktop files, which ensure they can be opened on demand by any user via a menu or launcher. The server applications such as NextCloud and AdGuard-Home typical ...

Alan Pope
8 March 2020

Safely Backup Google Photos

Desktop Article

With a smart phones in their pocket, most people don’t bother carrying a traditional camera anymore. For most, the single, double or even triple cameras on modern phones are great for making memories. Many Android and some iOS users have chosen to store their photos in the free or paid Google Photos service. In the ...

Alan Pope
6 February 2020

Building a Java snap by example

Ubuntu Article

Following up on the previous example of building a rust and C based snaps, I thought we’d take a look at bundling a Java application as a snap. In this example we’ll use an open source game called “Shattered Pixel Dungeon“. It’s a little more complex than some more common snaps, which helps highlight some ...

Alan Pope
13 December 2019

Building a Rust snap by Example

Desktop Article

There’s plenty of official documentation which details how to create snaps. We live in the copy/paste generation though. So lets walk through a real-world example you can use as a template, or selectively yoink sections from. This is the first in a series of posts which break down how to build snaps based on published ...

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