After helping to review applications for the Ubuntu App Showdown, I had the urge to take another look at the state of quickly, Ubuntu’s quick starter for app development. So here we have TypeCatcher. It allows you to search, browse, and download Google webfonts for off-line use. You can preview fonts with adjustable size and text.

It was mostly written in one Sunday afternoon a few months back. Though I put it aside for awhile, mostly out of my inability to come up with a name for it. The delay did allow me to flesh it out a bit. For the most part I was quite happy with quickly. The templates really do get you up and running fast. Though as I’m extremely comfortable with both bzr and Debian packaging, I didn’t really employ its ability to hide those parts from users.

(As a side note, on place where quickly fell a bit short for me was renaming the project. Sometimes you just want to start hacking and then think about naming later, but quickly uses your project name in file names and classes all over the place. It would be nice to bake project renaming into its UI. There is already a bug report about this on Launchpad including a renaming script in the comments.)

After dogfooding the app writing tools, I think I’ll probably test the submission process for the Ubuntu Extras repository as well. For now though, you can install it for Ubuntu 12.10 from my PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:andrewsomething/typecatcher sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install typecatcher

You can also grab the source from bzr on Launchpad:

bzr branch lp:typecatcher

Bugs and feature requests welcome there as well.

And of course, who doesn’t love screenshots: