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.

Hello everyone,

I figured I would make videos about Ubuntu Touch, to contribute spreading the word.

I'm thinking about making videos to present my applications, reviews/demonstration/tests of the system in general, and possibly videos where I explain why I'm using Ubuntu Touch, and how I got to it.

Here is my first video presenting the application Maps exporter:

English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR0eqz7wpyM
French version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOJkiSa28Ss

This is still quite experimental so if you have feedback on how to improve the videos for the next time feel free to do so!

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)

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 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,

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.

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.

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.

I really think that ideally there should be two distinct permissions for the apps:

• Foreground Microphone: The app can only access the microphone when it is foreground, that would be sufficient for most apps.

• Background Microphone: That would be usefull for only a small minority of very trusted apps , like phone apps that may need to maintain a call while the phone is suspended.

But it's very different to give the opportunity to spy on the microphone at any moment which is a critical permission, and to allow the app to use the microphone while on foreground which is what most app would need and is way less critical.

Also maybe make sure your window title and name are similar or equal to your application name, as Lomiri does a fuzzy compare to detect the application corresponding to a window.

@PerlMax

Well I don't know, I've not done anything in particular, with 24.04-1.3 there should be only one window by default for a Xwayland program.

Make sure to do

export GDK_BACKEND=x11
export DISABLE_WAYLAND=1 

before you start your app

@PerlMax

Yes, Well I guess your application is firing 2 windows, no?

You can install xdotool to list the existing xWayland windows.

My guess is, that this bug is not related to UT, but that your application is starting 2 windows.

@PerlMax

Yes but what version precisely? Because there was an important change about that between 24.04-1.2 and 24.04-1.3 .

Can you re-upload the screenshot we cannot see it!

@PerlMax

I can't see the screenshot!

What version of UT are you running?

@PerlMax said:

with my pEFL App, two windows open: one named "pefl" (my app) and one named "X11 Support."

In Min Browser (which also runs via Xwayland, right?), there's only one window. So somehow you managed to get rid of the "X11 Support" window.

Strange maybe you can post a screenshot, on your topic and mention me, I will reply there!

In Min Browser, the input from the Maliit Keyboard is sometimes overwritten (for example, I want to open www.google.de , but at some point it turns into www.googlegoogle.de ). I think it is this problem: https://github.com/minbrowser/min/issues/2705

Yes I plan to work on fixing that soon!

@PerlMax

Sorry but I'm not sure to understand your message, what you want to achieve, or what keyboard issue you are talking about.

Can you explain more?

I've published the new revision (0.1.8) with the following improvements:

-Fix layout problem coming from changes upstream
-Improve ContentHub handling
-Improve call icons layout

I should also not crash on 24.04-2.x, although it will probably not be usable yet, as for now it seems that On-Screen-Keyboard does not work on any XWayland app. I will try to investigate more about that soon.

I next revision I will try to add an option to configure scaling with fine grain, and few improvements/fixes in the UI.

By the way I've personally installed the script in a way that stands in time by creating a systemd file:
( Because it improves a log my day-to-day experience)

/etc/systemd/system/backup-4g.service :

[Unit]
Description=LTE backup Service
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/home/phablet/backup-ip.sh
Restart=on-failure
WorkingDirectory=/home/phablet/

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

and then

sudo systemctl enable backup-4g

So that it starts automatically at startup.

For this to work you need to have the script that I have posted above in /home/phablet/backup-ip.sh

@lduboeuf said:

Have you filed a bug somewhere ?

https://gitlab.com/ubports/porting/reference-device-ports/android11/volla-phone-22/volla-mimameid/-/work_items/26

I've not understood the quotes about 26.04!