Cassidy’s Blog
A barebones place for my thoughts. Some of my writing is also on the elementary blog, and I’ve written a few pieces for Android Police.
A New Chapter Wed, Aug 1, 2018
tl;dr I’m going full-time at elementary
My Career at System76 In 2013 I was looking for a new high end laptop to help with my elementary contributions—I wanted it to be…
Introducing New AppCenter Sharing URLs Fri, Jul 20, 2018
Easily share apps to users whether or not they’re on elementary OS
Over the past several weeks I’ve been working on a revamped appcenter.elementary.io. Today I’m happy to announce its official debut! In the past, this…
Developer Tips: Updating Your Apps for Juno Thu, Jul 19, 2018
Be ready to debut alongside elementary OS 5
Now that the developer previews for Juno beta1 and beta2 are out, it’s prime time for app developers to get their apps ready. In…
AppCenter Spotlight: Tootle Fri, Jun 15, 2018
Lightning fast client for Mastodon
It hasn’t been long since we featured an app by Bleak Grey, but he’s back at it. This month we’re taking a look at…
How the YouTube Music Rollout Should Have Gone Tue, May 29, 2018
Let’s Imagine an Alternate Universe
This whole YouTube Music thing has been really poorly handled. It’s not entirely clear where the overlap is between existing services and subscriptions, what…
Developer Tips: Backgrounding & System Integration Tue, May 15, 2018
Best practices for making your app a first-class citizen
How your app should integrate with elementary OS and run in the background can be a tricky topic; other platforms have different conventions like…
AppCenter Spotlight: Transporter Tue, May 15, 2018
Hassle-free file sharing
Transporter by Bleak Grey is pure magic. Based on a technology called Magic Wormhole (yes, really), it makes sharing a file across the room…
AppCenter Spotlight: Web Watcher Mon, May 14, 2018
Know when your websites are misbehaving!
On elementary OS? Hit the button to get Web Watcher. Web Watcher by KJ Lawrence is a native app that aims to replace third-party…
AppCenter Spotlight: quickDocs Fri, Apr 13, 2018
Quickly Read Developer Docs
On elementary OS? Hit the button to get quickDocs. quickDocs is a lightweight reader for developer documentation, made by Matt Harris. I chatted with…
Introducing Palette Tue, Apr 10, 2018
A new app for elementary colors
This past weekend, I realized I was opening a web browser to do something a native app could do better: referencing and copy-pasting colors….
Unroll the Purpleprint Wed, Mar 14, 2018
The story behind the elementary OS Beta wallpaper
In our Let’s Talk About elementary OS 5.0 Juno post, we debuted a new vibrant purple wallpaper with a sort of blueprint aesthetic going…
AppCenter Spotlight: Color Picker Fri, Mar 2, 2018
Speed up your workflow
On elementary OS? Hit the button to get Color Picker. It might look simple, but Color Picker by Ronny Dobra is a well-designed utility…
Why the Looped Square (⌘) Symbol? Thu, Mar 1, 2018
Keyboard shortcuts in elementary OS are the same no matter if it’s a Windows-branded keyboard or not; we just use the ⌘ looped square…
AppCenter Spotlight: Artem Anufrij Thu, Feb 15, 2018
Meet the one developer behind ten AppCenter apps
Artem Anufrij has become a sort of legend of AppCenter: he’s published ten apps (more than any other single developer so far), written a…
Let’s talk about elementary OS 5 Juno Mon, Feb 12, 2018
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We’ve avoided talking too much about Juno until recently because frankly, we’d been focused on pushing constant updates out to Loki. We’ve pushed out…
Developer Tips: Branding Your App Wed, Jan 31, 2018
How to give your app a unique but native look
With 75+ native GTK3 apps, AppCenter continues to fill out with quality experiences from several dozen developers. Many have begun to build their own…
AppCenter Spotlight: Image Optimizer Sun, Jan 28, 2018
Lossless compression couldn’t be simpler.
Sometimes you want a simple utility that just does one thing really well. For lossless image compression, Image Optimizer by Gijs Goudzwaard delivers in…
Secure By Default: Disk Encryption Wed, Jan 24, 2018
It’s time to better protect user data by default.
elementary and System76 got together last month to discuss and continue hacking on a new installer for future releases of Linux-based operating systems like…
Introducing New AppCenter Categories Wed, Jan 17, 2018
Better for both users and developers
We’ve been hard at work to refresh the categories on the AppCenter home page. This refresh includes some new categories plus some changes to…
Introducing Dippi Sun, Jan 14, 2018
A new app to calculate (Hi)DPI
Apparently writing a multi-part series on Medium isn’t enough for me; I just can’t stop thinking and talking about HiDPI! This time I’ve actually…
Scratch is now elementary Code Tue, Jan 2, 2018
More than a name change
In 2011, elementary debuted our own “text editor.” We’ve shipped it in elementary OS ever since as Scratch, the default app for handling any…
AppCenter Spotlight: 2017 Wrap Up Sat, Dec 23, 2017
Take a look back at 2017 and each Spotlight app from the year
It was just earlier this year that AppCenter debuted pay-what-you-want apps to elementary OS, and it’s been a great year for apps. After looking…
AppCenter Spotlight: Sequeler Wed, Nov 29, 2017
Easily connect to your local or remote database with this friendly SQL client
On elementary OS? Hit the button to get Sequeler. In the second-ever AppCenter Spotlight, I detailed the apps that users were asking for. One…
GNOME UX Hackfest 2017 Tue, Nov 21, 2017
Designing the future of GNOME Shell
I just got back from a week-long design hackfest in London focused on GNOME Shell and related components. It was a fantastic week with…
The State of AppCenter Mon, Oct 23, 2017
Six months, major updates, and over 50 quality apps!
This past May we released the major update to elementary OS that debuted the new pay-what-you-want app experience in AppCenter. In those past six…