Hi people, Here is another edition of the bi-weekly UBports news letter. This time with some short and sweet stuff.
You know, we currently have 2936 subscribers? That's 17 more since last edition. Let's get this to 3K! If we keep up this speed it will only take a few weeks. Amazing!
It is definitely summer over here, with some spiking temperatures! Hope all of you have a lovely summer with moderate temperatures ahead.
Anyway, sit back, grab hold of your favourite beverage and enjoy another episode of the UBports Newsletter (while I write this edition this time with the Mile Oldfield album "Heaven's open" playing.)
News, hot from the press!
Our friends at Volla are holding their 2022 Community Days this weekend!
And UBports' very own Florian Leeber will be giving a talk on Saturday morning. His talk will probably be somewhere between noon and 1 pm CEST, but full details can be found using this link:
Currently, there is a discussion¹ on the sailfish forum about a payment scheme for map services that might be worth looking into. It was started by rinigus, the author of Pure Maps and OSM Scout Server.
For now Ubuntu Touch users can use Pure Maps, uNav and OSM Scout Server completely for free. This is due to the fact that the service providers provide free service for a limited amount of accesses per month and that rinigus himself processes map data for offline navigation on his servers. B But this isn't sustainable and doesn't scale. On Sailfish the usage limits are hit from time to time and map service in apps stops working. If you like to chip into the discussion or have good ideas on how to solve this please jump in. All ideas are welcome and we as a community need to find a way to solve these kinds of challengers.
Apps in the spotlight
Here are some Ubuntu Touch apps to try out
CloudMusic (https://open-store.io/app/apu.johangm90) by Johan Guerreros lets you search, listen and download your favourite music. It has recently received an update and is now working again.
Seabass2 (https://open-store.io/app/seabass2.mikhael) by Mikhael Milikhin is a code editor with adaptive layout for mobile devices. The latest update added support for building apps using clickable.yaml files.
Please remember that OpenStore has a built-in option to donate to app creators. We urge you to use that button, so that we'll get more great apps on Ubuntu Touch.
Linux apps in the spotlight
A spontaneous addition to this popular section I like to draw some attention to a few Linux applications I recently found. Do you like this addition? Please let me know by writing me an email! Anyway, here goes:
Zinc, supposed to be an inplace replacement for ElasticSearch. Written in Go, a single binary is all it is. Very quick and low on the resources needed (unlike some other text index software we know :-) ). Anyway, it's here: https://github.com/zinclabs/zinc
Lionel Duboeuf is working on a Cell Broadcast feature, for instance used by mobile providers for emergency alerts. You can read his notes here: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/7798/the-cell-broadcast-story. If you want to add your ideas or help with development, please chime in on the forum.
Aaand.... It's a wrap! See you at the next edition and remember, keep on hacking!
