News and Update
AppLee presented.
Moem sent a message that Dutch supporters of UBports will be attending a hackerspace in Amersfoort in the Netherlands in September. Anyone in the area is welcome to come along. The idea is to showcase some working UBports devices and members of the community will be there to answer questions. See https://www.bitlair.nl for details.
New improvements
We are shifting to Noble and apps will have to be updated for that. If you are an active app developer for us, please get in touch about a discount which is available towards the cost of a Fairphone 5.
There have been some developments with AppArmor and some progress on encryption/decryption. There has been some refinement of aethercast. Most things have been frozen for 24.04.
Translation assistance is needed for the changed parts of the system so if you are on Weblate you are invited to help with that.
OpenStore apps
There have been some developments in the OpenStore. Pure Maps and Pure Maps Slim are great navigation apps. We had this before but Jonatan has now ported it over to Noble. Slim is a much smaller install. The reason for that is that the full version contains a very high-quality English voice. Sadly, that is the only language available in that high resolution voice.
Weston has been working to bring a lot of ‘lost’ apps to Focal. One of these is Gemini. It is a communication layer for accessing remote documents in Gemtext. They also ported Ambient, which contains ambient sound for background and getting to sleep. Sudoku is also back, thanks to them.
Leon has continued work on UT Translator. It has some limitations but it works offline.
The system Camera app has seen some work. The UI has been improved a lot when choosing and checking resolutions.
Document Viewer is another core app which has been refined. Jonatan fixed a problem with opening docx and pdf files in Noble.
The old Dekko email app has been revitalised and ported to Noble. A major task.
There is a beta version of Parasol, which is a weather app. Christopher has been working on that.
Teleports now has searchable chat. There has also been a lot of tidying up, from a team of people.
Time Management is still very actively updated.
Sponsors were thanked.
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.
Showcasing UT featuresDan asked in the forum whether it would be possible to have a section of the show devoted to showing how UBports works in action? That seems like a good idea, but we would need some feedback about the sort of things that you would like to see. The best way to do that would be to add some comments in the forum where this issue was raised. It’s good maybe be done as an instructional video rather than be part of the live show.
Snaps on noble
There was a long question from John Doe about the options for installing snaps directly in Noble. Work has already been done for that in Focal. Libertine ensures proper scaling on the phone whereas snaps can present problems with that and often although they are installed on the phone, you will have to use it in desktop mode. For now, you really need to have Libertine and snaps. Maybe one day we will get to the point where one of those can be dropped. Libertine is a container whereas snaps run natively.
Contributing to UBports
Faden asked whether it is necessary to be an adult in order to contribute to the UBports project? No, we don’t stipulate that and if you have a Gitlab account you are welcome to code for us. You can also help with answering questions of course if you were to attend to some of the events you will need to be by your parents. For attendance at events we do expect you to be accompanied by an appropriate adult.
A note from Podcast Ubuntu Portugal that membership of the UBports Foundation is also open to those under 18 if they meet the other criteria.
Offline maps
Jean-Luc advised that OSMScout driver has not yet been ported to Noble and until it has, Pure Maps will not work off-line.
VoLTE on Fairphone 3 and 4
Marius and Alfred popped in right at the end and gave a reminder that VoLTE is now working on Fairphone 3 and Fairphone 4.
Alfred said it would be fun to have a Quake 2 tournament, with a rule that players must use a UBports device to play.
See you next time :-)