Downloading a .flatpak or .flatpakref allows installing an app without having to use the commandline, at least on recent Fedora. The apps page should allow installing apps using this method, since it is the best UX. However, this will require that:

1. The apps provide those files.
2. The page includes guidance on which distros and versions support installing in this way; maybe the page will also need a way for the user to say which distro & version they are on, and then show appropriate installation methods depending on that.

Talking about flatpak at Flock the immediate question seemed to be "why not just use docker" -- it might be good to answer this question with some statements explaining how desktop apps are different and why ostree is a good choice etc.

Flatpak has a Twitter account now: https://twitter.com/FlatpakApps

It would be good to have a prominent link to it.

I love the idea of visually communicating the way Flatpak works and the current graphic looks great. There are a few issues I see with it though:

• Runtimes are available inside the sandbox, but they are portrayed as being outside.
• The animated lines represent very different things - the build process, calling a library at runtime, and IPC between app and operating system. However, they look equivalent, and to my eyes all look like IPC.
• The graphic doesn't represent the way that runtimes depend on operating systems, and apps depend on runtimes.
• It would be nice if the graphic could communicate that runtimes (and SDKs) contain libraries.
• The operating system block uses a GNOME logo; this might be confusing to a lot of people.

How some of these issues could be addressed:

Basically I had to figure it out based on the descriptions and the man page of the command line utility.
http://flatpak.org/runtimes.html should have the command line installation instructions like http://flatpak.org/apps.html has.

The technologies section should perhaps mention systemd --user and cgroups.

We may also want to add a list of dependencies / prerequisites somewhere.

App like atom and nylas is cool

The website doesn't currently include information on how to install files (like .flatpak, .flatpakref, .flatpakrepo) from the command line.

This might require an expanded set of user documentation, on a new page.

This would be interesting e.g. for packaging transmageddon, which wants to use decss if it happens to be installed on the host system.

On the "Build" section of the webpage, the example tutorial works fine until the user is instructed to run "flatpak build-export repo hello". The user then sees the output "error: Build directory hello not initialized". I believe that the user isn't supposed to get this error message.

Page in question: http://flatpak.org/#developers
log.txt

currently we only serve the site over http. It's 2016, we should serve it secure by default.

There should be a contact e-mail somewhere and a link to this github repo for reporting issues and sending pull requests with fixes.

It would be nice to leave out the $ to be display only to allow to elect the whole block to copy and paste

There's a couple of TBD's on that page

Son_Goku> alexlarsson, so JFYI, Mageia now has Flatpak in Cauldron as of this morning
it'll be part of the Mageia 6 release
7∶56 PM
it can be installed the same way it is on Fedora
as root, running "dnf install flatpak"
or, if using urpmi (the current default package manager), running "urpmi flatpak"

Probably doesn't need to be too prominent, but it would be good to have a link somewhere:

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/wiki

Apparently Vadim Rutkovsky has been buidling Firefox nightlies. We should point to them on the apps page.

We should have distinct page titles.

I had some issues getting through the tutorial, since I misnamed the file that should be called "metadata" to hello instead.
It might have been because under step 3, every other filename and folder in the tutorial that needs creation has a highlight, while the word metadata only has the "-charachters around it.

We should feature projects that support Flatpak prominently.

We should scroll back to top when hitting browser's back button

I've seen that newstructure2017 branch has a nice list of logos of distros where flatpak will be available. In the commits I've seen some changes about if they where also supported or just available.

In addition to the actual list of logos, maybe a good way to show the supporters of flatpak could be a carousel with some nice quotes. Somethink like this Responsive Quote Carouse

Recently Ikey Doherty from Solus talked very nicely about Flatpak in Linux Unplugged. He also announced that they are adopting flatpak as their solution for distributing 3rd party apps

His quotes and some from Endless and others could fit well. If you like the idea I can try to create a partial or something to add it to the homepage.

It's completely missing from the developer page, probably because they hadn't been implemented when it was written. Things the docs need to say here:

• High-level description of what portals are and how they work from the point of view of the user.
• Portals are typically accessed through a UI toolkit. Mention that GTK+ 3.22 will have portals support.
• If you are a toolkit developer or are writing a completely custom application, documentation is available: http://flatpak.org/xdg-desktop-portal/portal-docs.html

The link to the favicon is broken because the item does not exisits. This can be autogenerated in the build process with the middleman-favicon-maker gem or manually, of course.

https://flatpak.org/ does not seem to load, but http://flatpak.org/ does. The latter should probably redirect to the https version by default though...

In order to get a well maintained metadata for SEO, I recommend to use the gem 'middleman-meta-tags' [1]. Is quite easy to use, just have to write key:value tags in the site.yml file and the helper does the hard work for you.

Of course, I can craft a patch for that as well, but first I need to know some extra info ;-)

[1] https://github.com/tiste/middleman-meta-tags

This seems to work for most of the anchors on flatpak.org, but the svg under "How it works" links to the Library/Sandbox sections right below it and clicking on such a link will scroll to it correctly, but now the semi-transparent topbar the heading as well as the first line of the paragraph so one has to immediately scoll up again.

While the spacing is good before a code section begins, it's very short after a code section ends. The end result is not that nice and in parts of the documentation it's a bit confusing.

It would be nice if the spacing after a code section ends were increased to at least match the spacing before a code section begins and maybe be 50% more.

Alternatively it might be better to reduce a little the spacing before a code section begins and increase the spacing after a code section ends to what the spacing is now for before a code section begins.

Some of the headings link to sections on the home page - this is a bit confusing because it looks like the links below them are sub-pages within each section.

Also, some of the headings aren't quite right: "BUILD" and "RUN" don't seem to work as well here, it isn't clear that "Getting Started with Flatpak" is an app building tutorial, and "Downloading Flatpak" is inconsistent with the page it links to ("Getting Flatpak").

It might be better to do something like this:

HOME
About
Run
Build
Get Involved

APPLICATION BUILDING
Building a Java Application with Flatpak

GETTING FLATPAK
Runtimes

FAQ

While working through the tutorial, trying to learn something, I followed:

http://flatpak.org/developer.html

When reaching the section about the Manifests, one falls into the trap that the published one does not work: gnome-dictionary-3.22.0.tar.xz does not exist (the latest version for gnome-dictionary is 3.20.0; even configure.ac in git does not have a higher version)

When clicking "Get Involved" - http://flatpak.org/index.html#get-involved the section is small enough to actually not display Get Involved as the first thing on the page, which makes it confusing. I would consider putting an image (GNOME community or something?) as part of that section to both give a feeling of community and to fix the scroll issue. You can see what I mean here:

When using in-page links using #ids, the page scrolls to the top of the heading, which is covered by the headerbar.

GNOME 3.22 came out yesterday, and with it, the GNOME 3.22 SDK. [1]
However, on the runtimes page, only the version up until 3.20 is mentioned.

1. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2016-September/msg00043.html

The developer documentation should include details of how to sign - it's not obvious for some people and it is an essential step.

One of the great things about Flatpak is that you can distribute development versions of an app, as nightlies or something similar. The problem is that, if you give different versions of the app the same dbus name, they end up conflicting with each other [1].

It would be great to include guidelines for how to produce different versions. These would basically say:

• Rename the app in the .desktop file, such as adding "(Nightly)"
• Rename the dbus name, such as from "org.domain.app-name" to "org.domain.app-name-nightly"

[1] For details on how Software plans to deal with this issue, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=768729

The http://flatpak.org/developer.html has a sample flatpakrepo, but it lacks a reference to the runtime repo.

We should add the line:

RuntimeRepo=https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome.flatpakrepo

Since most of the development workflow is going to happen on github maybe it'd be nice to put a "Fork me on GitHub" ribbon.

While the "Get Involved" section is good, the ribbon is small, catchy and gets the message out that flatpak is FLOSS, has a github repo and uses github issues and that third-party contributors are welcome to improve it primarily using the github infrastructure.

Some websites that have ribbons:
https://github.com/blog/273-github-ribbons
https://simonwhitaker.github.io/github-fork-ribbon-css/
http://blog.dfilimonov.com/github-ribbons-css/
https://codepo8.github.io/css-fork-on-github-ribbon/

An omission from the "Getting flatpak" section: RHEL. Do we want to say something about it ?

In reply to the question "Can I host my flatpak app on github?" we end the answer on a limb:

"Flatpak repositories can't (currently) be put on github in a convenient way. As an alternative, you can create a single-file bundle, and put that up on github as a 'release'. Note that bundles have some drawbacks, compared to a repository."

I think it is a good opportunity to provide a convenient link here to some documentation which explains the concepts ("flatpak repositories", "single-file bundles") and elaborate further on the drawbacks of bundles compared to a repository.

Here are some questions that I think might be good to answer, either on the website itself, or as an faq:

• Can flatpak be used for servers too ?
• How does flatpak compare to other application sandboxing technologies: zeroinstall, glick, snap, ... ?
• How does flatpak compare to other packaging technologies: rpm, dep,... ?
• Which runtime should I use for my app ?
• What about security updates ?

Although the Get Involved looks like it should be enough, I would make more clear where to report issues and errors. Also make more clear where to do those for the website and for flatpak itself separately.

Took down Darktable from the app page as the flatpak wasn't really working[1]. Would be nice to have it back.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/692220/

foser_> https://github.com/fosero/flatpak-overlay unofficial overlay repo for gentoo ebuilds .. maybe something for on the website for now?

These were introduced in 0.6.10 and should probably be covered in the distributing applications section of the developer page.

There doesn't seem to be a good document on repository best practices (some of which may require the ostree command, some of which is up to flatpak). Stuff like: versioning (tagging versions you want to keep forever, vs. ones to delete), moving versions between branches, things like that. Basically how I'd approach FlatPak repo management, from a reprepro background.

I'm currently experiencing that one of my installed flatpaks aren't running. it would be nice if the website had a section inside "Build" for "Debugging flatpaks". Stuff like how to get a shell into the sandbox, how to check what permissions the flatpak has, how to find out what dependencies are available in the runtime etc.

See http://flatpak.org/press/2016-06-21-flatpak-released.html
All the other pages have something written in the title tag of the website.

I attempted to follow "Building More Complex Apps With flatpak-builder" and everything was running smoothly (making the json, executing flatpak-builder) until it hit an error whose scrollback I've posted. I did verify that I had 3.20 runtime and sdk installed.

flatpakbuilder.txt