Hi,

I just wrote a PDF reader based on Chromium PDF engine.

It's pretty dummy, written in 30 minutes. But quite useful (at least for me) given the limitations of Document viewer, and that sturmreader is currently broken on noble.

I think it will greatly benefit from Qt6 upgrade, when it comes, because of improvement of the engine in chromium.

It is published in the openstore:

https://github.com/pparent76/chromiumpdf

Regards,
Pierre.

I've succeeded in opening the keyboard when editing text in signal-desktop !!!!

I could do it reusing the work of @ChromiumOS-Guy in uWolf!

I can officially send signal messages from a native Ubuntu Touch app, without Waydroid!

Even though for now it's not convenient , since keyboard hides the text area, and the enter button of the keyboard somehow does not trigger sending the message, and the "send" button in signal is hidden until you expend the editing area. But still very usable.

For now everything is messy, but I will try to make it available soon (I think it should be possible to do a click package, but I'm not sure yet)

Ps: Note that I could do it with Mobian version only for now.

Hi,

Just wanted to share that VLC 4 (not yet released) has an interface very close to VLC for Android.

I will be a very good candidate to port to Ubuntu Touch. The interface would probably be usable as such, but with few minimal patches to the interface it could probably be near perfect on the phone screen.

I don't have time to do that now, but probably later (possibly when release officially)

Hi,

Just wanted to mention that I contacted the in-development French identity mobile app, to ask them for interoperability, and remind them their duty to make sure public service is available for everybody, and that their role was not to enforce the choice of mobile OS of their citizens.

https://france-identite.gouv.fr/

Surprisingly I got a pretty open and positive reply, apologizing that their app was not compatible with my OS (Ubuntu Touch), and saying they shared the goal of interoperability, and would study that with the development team what was possible. I did not expect such a positive answer, although I don't know if anything concrete will get out of this.

As a side note I wonder why for this kind of app, with a real need of interoperability, they don't use more Qt, because from what I understand Qt allows to develop apps for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux desktop, Linux mobile (Ubuntu Touch, Sailfishos, Mobian, postMarketOs, pureOs, ect...), all at once, with only few custom things to go for each platform. Any thoughts on that?

Hi,

Today I just figured why not try:

sudo snap install signal-desktop

And I realize it just works! This is crazy. With this simple command I can link my device and see my chats. Well it is certainly not a responsive interface (but not terrible either, there's just the left menu coming in the way) and the keyboard does not show for now. But I can consult messages, and this is major.

It means:

1°) We can certainly create quite easily a version of Signal-Desktop that is adapted to mobile display (with few patches to the interface to make it responsive), and that we can get a full-fledge signal client on Ubtunu touch, that way.

2°) That Mir2.0 will certainly help with that.

Ps: I guess the first easy thing to make it usable as a consul-only stuff is adapt the scale, which I guess must be easily doable.

Anyway after all the investigations that I've made I'm extremely confident that we'll be able to have a fully responsive client based on Signal-Desktop landed in the openstore within few month. I see exactly how to make it perfectly adapted to the phone Interface like whatsweb. (Funny enough it is possible to use a modified version of the js script of whatsweb to make the interface responsive, because the interface has an extremely similar structure. )

It's not anymore a question of "if" but a question of "when". But there are few tedious tasks in the way, and I need to go little by little, because I can't dedicate all my time to this.

Of course I'm open to any offer for help and testing!

Hi,

Just wanted to mention that a nice and easy addition to Ubuntu touch would be wifi captive portal via RFC 8910 and RFC 8908.

It is actually very simple:

1- When you get a DHCP lease in the wifi interface look for option 114
2- If there is a URL in option 114 it's an API, just make a simple HTTP GET request on this URL (no parameters or header)
3- The result will be a json, if it contains "captive"="true" and has an "user-portal-url" field then we should just open this "user-portal-url" in the browser and it will allow the user to authenticate to the captive portal and use the wifi!

Really I think that's any easy addition, I may try to contribute this inside the OS when I have time.

Ps: Adding a simple script in /etc/dhcp/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/ to do that should do the trick I guess.

I've been able to recompile Signal-Desktop from source and apply my responsive script.

It is available in the Openstore alongside these other improvements:
-Fix startup from OpenStore
-Fix open url externaly
-Fix battery problem
-Fix double window problem

There still are some keyboard issues, it's probably the next thing I will work on.

First of, thank you so much for the development on Ubuntu Touch, it is becoming amazing!

I have a question about Wayland/Xmir apps (e.g uWolf, Signal-desktop, Snap apps) in the context of the upcoming Mir2.0

Will you consider implementing any of the following, to polish experience with Wayland apps:

• Standard desktop notifications showing as UT notifications (with sound, vibration, status led, notification panel).
• Easy Import/export files from content-hub by having a custom xdg-desktop-portal for content-hub.
• Open url externally, by making an URLdispatcher app as default desktop browser.
• Review and possibly adapt apparmor profiles to make sure they don't prevent confined Wayland/Xmir apps from accessing the hardware the way they normally do it (GPU ,microphone, camera, ,...), when they should be allowed to access it. (Eg: Signal-Destkop can access microphone when unconfined, but not when it has the confined + microphone profile.)

Would you need/accept some help to do that?

@AppLee

They have not reached out to me again, but I would say every french citizen that use UT is entitled to contact them about this concern and the more they receive requests about that, the more they are likely to take it seriously. And I guess it is also possible to send them a message in the name of the fundation with an offer for assistance on the technical side.

https://france-identite.gouv.fr/contact/

Ps: By the way an argument that seems efficient to draw their attention lately, in the current context, is stressing that by not being inter-operable (as they are legally obliged) they are effectively offering a duopoly to 2 American companies, and preventing any potential alternative from emerging.

@Leroy_Linux said in Waydroid won't start, says waydroid init requires root access...:

I was hoping I could get Signal working well but perhaps I need to downgrade to stable or be patient/wait.

For what it's worth, the keyboard does not work correctly with Signal UT on 24.04-2.x, but it works well on 24.04-1.x. ( https://open-store.io/app/signalut.pparent )

Calls are available in this new app:

https://open-store.io/app/whatslectron.pparent

@projectmoon @mihael @vlad-nirky

I would like to maybe find a better name that "Whatslectron" because this is a name the I've found rapidly but it seems to long, at least for the icon.

I've been thinking in "Whatse⁻" "Whatsem" "Whatsep", ect... But I'm not 100% convinced by any of them.

Any idea or preference?

@projectmoon

Yes but for now I needed something that works fast, and I know how to make an electron app work fast on UT, for now QT6 bundling is a bit more obscure to me.

Also I think Electron apps really have advantages for this kind of important and complex webapp, because it does not depend on the webengine of the system that can easily become too old, and it's way more flexible. Sadly he version of the webengine in Morph Qt6 is still a bit old, and not as performant as Chromium 140+ .

I know that electron apps currently have the disadvantage to run on XWayland, but it will hopefully be solved with Mir2.x release, making them more performant et more integrated to the system, and perfect for this kind of complexe webapp that are very sensitive to the browser engine version.

Also @chromiumos-guy is working on xdg_portal integration that will fursther help with better integration of electron apps into the system. ( Thanks! )

@mihael

Yes newer Chromium web engine is way more efficient, but this should be even better when we can switch this app to Wayland (instead of Xwayland) and use the GPU to accelerate rendering, this will be when the system upgrades Mir to 2.x.

(Unfortunately there are still some few keyboard-related Quirks in this version that I will try to improve in the coming weeks.)

@mihael

Ha yes you are right, there is an Error on the english name. I will correct on later revisions of Min Browser and Whatslectron

Ok this is very strange, I do not have this behavior on none of my 2 phones.

I will investigate later.

@Vlad-Nirky said in Whatslectron: Whatsapp Web with Electron.:

I have tried and it works too on 24.04-2.x

On 24.04-2.x the keyboard does not work though, I presume, except if they have just fixed the bug.

@mihael

Can you give a screenshot of the icon just to make sure we talk about the same thing?

@mihael Great that it works for you.

Here is the topic dedicated to this new app: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/11962/whatslectron-whatsapp-web-with-electron