From your editor

Hi people, Here is another edition of the bi-weekly UBports news letter. Again with a bit of news and some sweet stuff.

We currently have 3032 subscribers to our newsletter! 26 more than 2 weeks ago. Amazing! .

I think this edition will be a bit short. It seems the whole world is on vacation and nothing much is happening on the UBports side of things. Too bad actually. Now that you as my beloved readers are on holiday and have all the time to read a news letter and all I have are breadcrumbs. Well, what can you do, right?

Anyway, sit back, grab hold of your favorite beverage (currently drinking a Coke Zero and listening to ABBA's "Voulez Vous"-album (Mellow PLayer/Ubuntu 22.04 desktop)) and enjoy another episode of the UBports Newsletter.

News, hot from the press

I don't know if you have ever heard of the LWN.NET website. It is a tiny site, run by Linux kernel hacker and all round nice guy Jonathan Corbet. The site does not have a polished look but is filled to the brim with interesting tech stuff. Jonathan is very capable of explaining deep technical Linux kernel stuff in an way that even I can understand it.

Anyway, this time Slam Doniker wrote an article on LWN titled "Android apps on Linux with Waydroid". A nice introduction into an app with much potential. You can find it here: https://lwn.net/Articles/901459/

One more/last(?) time about MCH2022

So recently there was the Dutch MCH2022 event. Where we did a workshop and a talk. Well, actually I did two talks because, well why not?. I did a talk on Sunday titled "UBports: Imagine a phone that does everything you expect and nothing you don't."

There is a recording that can be found here: https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-124-ubports-imagine-a-phone-that-does-everything-you-expect-and-nothing-you-don-t-. (Personally I have done better in the past, but a hacker event with loud music until 3 in the morning makes for less sleep and that does tend to bring down the quality a bit, sorry about that).

Anyway, it turns out people were still happy because I got some feedback from viewers liking the talk.

Like this one: " Hi Jeroen, Just listened to the mp3 of your presentation at the UT App Development Workshop. I congratulate you on your delivery: content; enthusiasm; passion; all first class. Also, you handled the questions in a most convincing manner.
Great job; much respect. Kind regards,"

Always nice to receive such an email! But it also got some nice mentions on the forum:

"Q&A120 is over but I want to make a comment. So much amazing, interesting and important progress. a big thank you from the deep of my heart to all involved developers. I also saw the video with the great talk from Jeroen at MCH2022 ( https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=-7nu2tmr-lQ )to attract greater attention for Ubuntu Touch/Ubports and the goals. I have noticed the animation of developers with the workshop and the book to make the start easier for them to create apps. That's really impressive what is going on."

And this one, also on the forum: "For those who have not yet seen Jeroen Baten's talk at MCH2022 here it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7nu2tmr-lQ well worth a watch."

So, to all, thank you so much for the warm feedback. This gives me a lot of energy! Thanks!

P.S. For those who are curious about my second talk at MCH2022, it was called "Running a mainframe on your laptop for fun and profit" and can be viewed here. Thinking about it, I see that MCH2022 had a total of 4 talks all with a title saying "for fun and profit", so I guess I have to think of another catchy title for the next talk :-).

Apps in the spotlight

Here are some Ubuntu Touch apps to try out

Podphoenix (https://open-store.io/app/soy.iko.podphoenix) by Ilia Kostiuchenko is a fork of Podbird, a podcast manager app. Its goal is to improve the speed and stability of the original app.
Quake II Touch (https://open-store.io/app/quake2touch.fredldotme) by Alfred Neumayer is a port of the classic Quake II first-person shooter game for Ubuntu Touch. Right now it only supports devices with OpenGL ES 3.0 (Halium 9.0 and up), but it has hardware acceleration for graphics, on-screen touch controls, an integrated downloader for the demo version, and multiplayer.
GhostCloud Photo Backup (https://open-store.io/app/me.fredl.ghostcloudphotobackup) by Alfred Neumayer is an automatic backup companion to the GhostCloud app. It creates silent backups of all your images and can store them in multiple clouds at the same time. It supports NextCloud, ownCloud and WebDav instances.

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.

Help needed

If you have some spare time, we could use some help in the following domains:

- Maciek Sopyło is interested in implementing system-wide call/number blocking in Ubuntu Touch. He has been thinking a lot about it and things are slowly falling into place. Please let him know your wish list for his feature in this forum post: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/7030/call-number-blocking-wish-list

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 120

Q&A 120 is still the last edition that you can go see at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyLtqadrpS. Usually there is a transcript in a blog post by now, but for very good personal reasons it has been delayed. Still, you can simply go and watch this episode if you've not done that before.