| Hello community!Welcome to the UBports Foundation email newsletter, June 25th, 2021 |
From your editorSo, here we are again! Another news letter from the UBports Foundation about the Ubuntu Touch project. Remember my rather philosophical question about the naming of our mascot?
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| Just for fun I made a small poll and as you can see we got absolutely flooded with responses. Off a total of 1884 subscribers we got a response of a total of, well, 29 people doing this small poll. Clearly with such low numbers and even a very small difference between the 2 options I think we can safely keep things currently as they are.
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On another matter, today, the day that I write this news letter to be send to you, happens to be also the birthday of my wife for 14 years now. (and no, she's not 14 years old! :-)). So if you think todays news letter is a bit short, well, yes, that is entirely possible. The good news is, I've been told that people who celebrate more birthdays also live longer. I hope all is well on your end.
Warm greetings and stay safe! Jeroen Baten |
Teaser time!!!I like to tell you all something. But I can't. Not yet. I have to wait till the next edition to tell you more. So, this is a teaser. Or a cliff hanger. Or just a small annoying text that doesn't tell you anything. Yes, I know. It's frustrating. But, not all is lost. Next edition I will tell you more! I promise. Scouts honour. This makes me thing. This news letter is send to people living everywhere in the world. What do people say in your country when they are very seriously promising something? Is there some sort of specific saying? Tell me! Send an email to jeroen@ubports.com and I will bundle those in the news letter's next edition.
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In our communityRemember how I asked you again, and again
(,and again), to send me press contacts? Well, since the last news
letter I got even more responses! So a big thanks to all who send me an email at jeroen@ubports.com with press contact email addresses.
At
the moment, the current status is that we 147 (up from 122) press
contacts in 19 (up from 14) countries. It's still not the 195 possible
countries in the world, but it's a whole lot better than nothing. I
still think we are working on the best and most descent, mobile OS that
nobody knows about. But we are all working very hard to change that! Look at the picture to the right. Is your country not listed yet? Drop me an email with some info about IT magazines and big news papers in your country. Please understand that I can not read every language in the world, so I need your help to get the email addresses. But everything you send will be added here, so we can spread the news about UT to the world!
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Brandbook progressDid I tell you before about the brandbook? Well, no, I guess I didn't. I'm so sorry. Well, the "UBports Marketing +" team has done a lot of work developing this brandbook. The resulting brandbook can be used to harmonize the styling of everything we do. What colours to use, what fonts to use, how to style stuff, those kind of things. Currently the brandbook is finished as a standard and is currently being converted from its current PDF form into a multi-layered Scribus document. This way we can add layers with the text in other languages to help users of the brandbook. When the conversion is finished, the PDF of the brandbook, and all source files will be stored in their own GitLab repository for community members to use. Soon I will tell you more about that. Help needed!If you have some spare time, we can use some help in the following domains: Morph browser doesn't block tracking ads or invisible trackers. If someone can test some browsers that are similarly built on Qt WebEngine and finds that they have incorporated some good protections, we could in principle ‘borrow’ their solutions with minimal effort. A good test is Cover Your Tracks ( https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ ), a project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Ari has put out a survey to gather feedback from Android 9 porters, so that he can understand the most effective approach to document their efforts and make porting easier. If you are porting Ubuntu Touch to a device, please ask for the survey in the @ubports_porting Telegram channel.
Currently we are in high need for some volunteers to help to improve the documentation. Especially the beginners course to get started with app development could do with some TLC. So, if your summer holiday is coming up and you wonder what to do, head over to https://qt-programming-course-sphinx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ and see if you can store some of your personal wisdom in this.
| Ubuntu Touch Q&A 102The
Ubuntu Touch Q&A 102 session had an interesting discussion about
why we’re all in this: what makes Ubuntu Touch unique as a mobile
operating system? Dalton and Alfred where the hosts of the Ubuntu Touch Q&A 102, and they received an interesting question about the purpose of Ubuntu Touch. Is it about getting rid of your Android phone completely and using it as a daily driver? Dalton professed himself to be a practical person. If Ubuntu Touch wasn’t a practical solution, he wouldn’t be using it as a daily driver. Of course, if you’re hooked on particular Android or iOS apps, that could stand in the way of your use of Ubuntu Touch. However, many Android apps work or will work in Anbox. Alfred counts himself in the idealist camp, and he’s interested in the level of control he has over his phone. In iOS you can’t tweak the operating system if you need it to behave differently. With Ubuntu Touch, you are able to alter the core of the system, which opens a lot of possibilities. That’s how Alfred was able to develop ISODrive, an app to boot your PC from an ISO file on your Ubuntu Touch device. This isn’t possible in Android. |
Yet another anigifWe are currently working with the nice people at Volla to start an add campaign in Germany for the Volla phone pre-installed with Ubuntu Touch. One thing already created but not well known is a first draft of the landing page ubports.volla.online. This page is still being developed on, so be gentle please. And we are now tuning what UBports/UT branding/picture we can put on that page. Somewhere during the discussion this idea for an animated GIF came up. We are still not sure about the "developed by" text, because most of this is done by our awesome community, but, well, a "community" for most outsiders unfortunately is just too vague. I'm still looking for the perfect wording...All ideas are welcome.
Anyway, what do you think? Yea or nea? |
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Yet another tech article (YATA?)
Maybe you've heard of VoLTE before. It stands for Voice over LTE (Wikipedia srticle)
and it is expected that in time will be the protocol every phone
operator is using. This means it's a must that Ubuntu Touch supports
this.
As a first step, we have commissioned an organisation with a lot of open source development experience, Sysmocom to take a look at the work that needs to be done. Pretty soon we will receive their report. Hopefully it will tell us how hard it will be to get the VoLTE protocol working on Ubuntu Touch and what would be the best course of action to get this done. Stay tuned for more updates on this! | And... it's a wrap! Stay tuned for our next episode in two weeks. If you want to let me know what you think, write me an email (jeroen@ubports.com) |
Thank you for joining us! |
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