Your biweekly UBports news letter is here!

jeroen@UBports.com

From your editor

Hi people, Here is another edition of the bi-weekly UBports news letter. This time with some short and also big announcements.

The most important of this is: I (still) have to cut down on time spend to make this news letter. My agenda is simply too full. So, in order for this news letter to continue to be as informative as possible, we, as a community, need to step in. Please email me at jeroen@ubports.com if you like to start pitching in in writing this news letter.

So sit back, grab hold of your favourite beverage and enjoy another episode of the UBports Newsletter (while I write this edition this time with music from Alison Moyet and Tears for Fears on. Still running the same excellent and very stable MellowPlayer flatpack instance on my Ubuntu desktop)

News, hot from the press

Volla has a new model coming! They started a kickstarter for the initial release (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/volla/volla-phone-22-the-beauty-of-freedom). It has a nice discount for the early birds compared to when the regular model will become available. Volla also has a nice setup by containerizeng the OS so users can simpy reboot from Volla OS into UT if they like to give our beloved OS a try. Or the other way around of course!

We reached out to UBports Foundation board member Ricardo Mendoza for a quote about this development:

"Ubuntu Touch is about freedom of choice, and the new mobile offering
from Volla will undoubtedly be a strong center of gravity for both
existing Ubuntu Touch users and newcomers alike. We see a fantastic
leap ahead with the Volla Phone 22 in terms of quality, usability and
putting control back in the hands of the users, and we are happy to
help everyone around the world once again find choice when shopping
for something as important as a mobile phone."

It seems the internet also welcomed the news, as a simple search turns up already a few articles about this. To list just a few:

Liliputting.com: https://liliputing.com/2022/04/volla-phone-22-runs-ubuntu-touch-or-a-privacy-focused-android-fork-or-both-crowdfunding.html
cnx-software.com: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/04/20/volla-phone-22-ubuntu-touch-or-a-google-free-android-os/
And I was able to mention it during an interview on Dutch Business News Radio podcast: https://www.bnr.nl/podcast/de-technoloog/10473144/de-strijd-om-git

In our community

Today the 22nd is the last day for the currently running election for a new Board of Directors and for the Membership Committee! All those eligible to vote have received an email with which they can send in a reply and cast their votes. Soon we will know the outcome!

In other news: uAdBlock is back again! Thanks to the help of the community, the backend service for the uAdblock project has been redeveloped. Through this new development, it is possible to provide much more resource efficient and faster the lists for all users. More news at UBports Forum (https://forums.ubports.com/topic/7697/uadblock-is-back-again)

New course modules in UBports Training!

We're still working on our Ubuntu Touch app development courseware: a way for people to learn how to create apps for Ubuntu Touch. We've published drafts of the first five course modules now on https://ubports.gitlab.io/teams/marketing/education/ub-clickable-1/. The recently added fifth(!) module covers downloading and storing data in your Ubuntu Touch app.

We'd love to get some feedback on these course modules. Try it out and let us know what isn't clear or where you get stuck. Open an issue on https://gitlab.com/ubports/teams/marketing/education/ub-clickable-1 with your question or send an email to koen@ubports.com. And if you're an experienced Ubuntu Touch app developer and you see something wrong or incomplete in the course, please contribute a merge request with your suggested changes.

Last but not least, we'd like to publish the final course on a nice URL such as https://training.ubports.com/ub-clickable-1. We're using GitLab Pages to publish the course, and its settings allow you to use a custom domain. However, this will link https://training.ubports.com to our course, and we'd like to add other courses later under the same URL, such as https://training.ubports.com/ub-clickable-2. We've not yet found a solution to this. If you're a GitLab Pages expert and you know how to solve this, please let us know by opening an issue in the course repository.

April 22nd,2022

Challenge of the Month

Take the App dev course and let us know what you think!

Take the course >

Apps in the spotlight

Here are some Ubuntu Touch apps to try out:

Put Aside (https://open-store.io/app/putaside.comiryu) by Steven Granger lets you track your savings for things you want to buy.
Cinny (https://open-store.io/app/cinny.nitanmarcel) is a Matrix client focusing on a simple, elegant and secure interface. It's developed by Ajay Bura and made into a Click package by Nitan Alexandru Marcel.
Personal Database (https://open-store.io/app/tcbase.daniel) by Daniel Schlieckmann lets you create databases with tables to manage things like your library, music, TODO items and much more.

You can find these apps on the OpenStore (https://open-store.io/).

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.

See you at the next edition! And remember, keep on hacking!

Jeroen Baten
UBports

An der Kolonnade 11 Berlin

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TET Update 3 aka 0011: The first public development meeting was a success!