The modern way of getting programs or Apps for your mobiles, computers, tablets and games consoles is the ever popular App Stores. Now the convenience of the App store has come to the Raspberry Pi with the PiStore.

raspberrypi.org has developed the pi store, users can add and download programs, tutorials and other content for free of for a free from the convenience of your Raspberry Pi's desktop.

Unfortunatly the PI Store has been closed down

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released the Pi Store, an App store which is installed to the Raspberry Pi's desktop. Any Raspberry Pi user can add content to the PiStore and make it available to the whole community as a free download or if you want to make a few pounds you can set a fee for a download. If you do choose to make your content free, which will make it more popular,  you can still earn some money as there is an option to leave a tip if you like a particular download and would like to show your appreciation, which is a nice feature.

The types of things that people can submit is not just limited to complete software. If the content is Raspberry Pi related then it can be included such as Python programming source code, images, video and audio, tutorials and shortly projects using Scratch, a programming language aimed at children. To make sure the PiStore only contains suitable content all items submitted will be checked before they are included.

How to get the PiStore

The PiStore is available in the latest Raspbian installation image at RaspberryPi.org/downloads

If you would just like to add the PiStore to your existing Raspbian installation then you can use the following command in LXterminal

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install pistore

The Pi Store initially has 5 sections available.

Games which includes:

Raspberroids a simple arcade game, the games files are included so you can learn top make your own version of the game.

Iridium Rising is a 3D multi player space combat game.

Apps which includes:

Libre Office an office package including a Word Processor, Spread Sheet, Database and presentation programs rich with features and compatible with other Office packages such as Microsoft Office.

Code Blocks an C++ development environment for C++ programmers

GrafX2 a drawing program suitable for drawing game sprites

Tutorials:

Raspberry Invaders, everything you need to learn to program a space invaders clone using the Python programming language.

Development which includes:

Chimera is a games engine using OpenGL simplifying games development fro programmers.

WebIOPi is a web based GPIO controller for electronics enthusiasts

Pi3D, Python libraries for 3D programming

Media:

All issues of the dedicated Raspberry Pi magazine The MagPi