News and Update
Florian, Alfred and Marius presented.
Documentation
Ari has taken the decision to try some machine learning to develop and improve our porting documentation. The hope is that it will be more comprehensive and easier to read.
Noble News
Alfred has been working on a version of snaps for Noble, using libhybris. It is just a preview at the moment and needs to be seeded with the main image. We need to build it as part of the rootfs. Alfred has the idea of developing this so that if for example you wanted to install CUPS you could just tick a box and it would be done automatically.
A Mir2 fix by Notkit has smoothed some rendering issues at range of frame rates. The Great Wizard of Askalis has fixed a serious kernel problem. Many thanks to them.
We are waiting for the push service to catch up so that a backlog of preparations for Noble can be fed into the image. Location and location service indicator will be among those.
Phone call audio is more or less fixed. NFCs and fixes two indicators should land soon. We have seen some testing of NFCs but not yet and the actual implementation within apps. We would very much welcome some of those.
Hotspot, media playback and Camera are on the way. The step after that is clickable support and that stage we are looking at an alpha release.
OpenStore apps news
One is called. ‘Where?’ by Joan. It handles GPS links.
ExPhone is a very useful app by Jozef which can block unwanted calls. Going back to some time ago, there was a paid for one which claimed to do the same thing, but we were always a bit doubtful about how it was achieving that.
London Transit does exactly what it says and has been recently updated. Great that this has been provided by Amy.
Waydroid Helper is a Swiss Army type app providing lots of functions. A lot of fixes have been introduced by Maciek.
Radar by Sander provides weather information for the Netherlands and has seen some improvements.
Rockwork for the Pebble watch is still receiving updates. Muhammad has done a lot of work on that recently.
MiTubo by Alberto is a simple stream player. The latest version has a very useful fix which allows you to choose the best quality stream to download.
Time Management is currently in beta and has been provided by Synconics Technologies. Its particular aim is to work convergently on phone and laptop.
G!S forecast app by Vlad also does what it says. it provides information from GiS Meteo.
Alfred has fixed some crashes in MiniBrowser.
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Questions
The News section of our forum is the best place to post questions for the Q&A. YouTube live chat, Telegram and Matrix are other places to post a question.
If you didn't know, the Forum questions get priority.
Pacemaker
Kristoffer uses a pacemaker and through his Samsung phone it communicates data to the local hospital. He wants to know whether UT could do something similar? This is very much a necessity not a nice to have and in this case we would strongly urge you to keep using Android for this purpose.Swedish
Kristoffer also notes that Swedish is turned off on Weblate. It will be nice to do some translation so this could be fixed? Florian has asked about this in the language group but has not received a reply yet.Volla installs
Are the Volla installs different between the SD card install and the full install? The team didn’t know anything about an SD card install so they were not able to help. Florian’s guess was that the only difference would be with the boot sequence.Mouse
Kamil asked whether there will be a mouse orientation fix. It it gets stuck between landscape and portrait. This seems to be a problem with the PineTab but not with the Jingpad. On the X axis in landscape mode the mouse sticks halfway as though it was still in portrait. This unfortunately is an open bug.Lomiri
Kristoffer asked another question. What was the reason for using Lomiri for UT? The answer is that it is the thing which will do what we want. That is to provide full convergence and a UI which responds to its environment by changing its shape. It helps that it is already thoroughly tested and stable.Our ethos has always been ‘phone first’ and it meets that requirement. It is the only desktop environment that is ready to give to your grandmother today and have it work. We will say again “phones are not PCs”. If you mess around with UT, you won’t fundamentally break it and if you enter flight mode accidentally you will figure a way out.
We are at least on the way to fixing emergency alerts on the UT system. Marius used a UT phone to call the emergency services when he broke his ankle on the top of a mountain!
VoLTE
Kristoffer asked in live chat whether VoLTE is now stable? With Qualcomm the answer is very simple. It is very unstable. In Mediatek it isn’t perfect but it is reasonably stable. It isn’t solely a UT problem. For example, Florian has a pixel 2 phone which was never officially sold in Austria and will not get a fix for the local networks when 3G is switched off. With 2G, there was just one standard so it just worked. With 3G it is a complete mess.Just to be clear, we’re not saying that anyone should buy a Mediatek based phone because that is the one working at the moment. Rest assured that we are still working on Qualcomm and will fix that. We certainly hope to achieve that before any 3G service is shut down in Europe. Of course, if you don’t have a UT phone at all you may want to think about getting something like a Volla phone so that you are with Mediatek.
See you next time :-)