Igor Ljubuncic

Snaps. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the OSS Snapcraft. Its continuing mission, to provide snap users with simple, clear and effective tips and tricks on how to build and publish their applications. In this tutorial, we are going to talk about confinement and interfaces – how to restrict what your snaps can

Last week, we published Introduction to snapcraft, a tutorial that provided a detailed overview of the snap build process. We touched on the concepts like snap ecosystem components, snapcraft command line, snapcraft.yaml syntax, and more. We’d like to expand on the first lesson, and today, we are going to talk about parts and plugins, use

First steps are always hard, especially in technology. Most of the time, you need a primer, just the right dose of knowledge, to get started with a platform. This tutorial and upcoming sequels are designed to provide developers with simple, clear and effective tips and tricks on how to build and publish their applications as

If you think of the Internet as a big flat disk balancing precariously on the shoulders of titans, one of those titans happens to be gaming. People use their computing devices for a range of tasks, but playing games, solo or online, with friends or against friends, is a universal activity that crosses countries, cultures,

Creating videos is easy. Creating great videos, not so much. A good production starts with an idea, but it also requires talent, time and tools. We cannot do much about the first two, but we sure can give you some nice ideas on the tools you want to make snappy videos. Typically, a video production

Several months ago, we shared an article titled I have a need, a need for snap that detailed the application performance results of snaps compared to their classic repo counterparts. We tested GIMP and VLC on both Ubuntu and Fedora, with some rather interesting findings. The one aspect of the application usage sequence we did

Sharing is caring. Alexander the Great File transfer is the bread and butter of information exchange in the digital world. Documents, photos, videos, we share them with our colleagues and friends. The only problem is, the Internet is a global village with many languages – and we’re talking about software, not humans. If you want

“All my centurions develop using snaps.” Julius Caesar By and large, software development can be an enjoyable process. Until you hit the first error, that is. At that point, you want to get past the stumbling blocks as quickly as possible and resume building your apps. A robust, flexible development framework can make a big

Data backups are arguably the most important part of one’s software setup. While many scenarios fall into the realm of if, data loss belongs in the when domain. Over time, every one of us will experience some kind of hardware failure, be it an optical disk, a hard disk or a lost phone. It is

A reliable data backup plan should be an integral part of everyone’s software arsenal. If you accidentally delete your files, or something goes wrong in your setup, you will have your data safely stored in another location. This will allow you to recover quickly and resume working. Likewise, if you suffer a hardware failure or

Two weeks ago, my colleague Alan wrote an article on how one goes about packaging an application as a snap. The focus of that piece was a handful of tips and tricks that should make the transition from raw code to a working snap easier and more fun. Today, I’ll give you a slightly different

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about snap security, taking a journey through the eyes of a developer and handing over to a user who wants to install applications from the Snap Store. We discussed concepts like application confinement, interfaces, store review, and automatic updates. Today, we will look under the hood, and examine

Quite often, security and functionality are two opposing forces. Vendors are trapped in a zero-sum game between providing their users as much freedom in the software they use and limiting said freedom to create tightly controlled and secure products. But this does not have be the case. For the last several years, Linux users have

Software development is what happens in between users and bug reports. Niccolo Machiavelli In an ideal world, developers would be able to create new applications without any errors, and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, errors, warnings and bugs are an inseparable part of the process. Sometimes, these problems are caused or magnifie

November was a productive month for us. As you’ve already glimpsed in the KDE snaps article, we hosted a Snapcraft Summit in our London offices, during which we worked with engineers from major companies on building snaps. Hailing from Intel, Julio Montes joined us to improve the Kata Containers snap, to make it easier for

Are snaps slow? Or slower than their classic counterparts (DEB or RPM, for instance)? This is a topic that comes up often in online discussions, related to various containerised application formats, including snaps. We thought this would be a good idea to run a detailed experiment to see what kind of numbers we get when