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,

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.

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!

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.

@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.

Craziest thing:

The calls are partially working out of the box!!!!
Which means we can certainly get calls working one day!

@mihael said in Great news: Calls availiable in whatsapp web!:

Is it launched in production as well?

Yes

An there has been so many failed upgrades these late months, with several hours of downtime and/or bugs I don't understand.

@mihael

It's true that it does not seem to do anything for now, when clicking on the button....

I don't really understand how whatsapp keeps pushing things in production to whatsapp web that simply don't work as if it were a beta tester channel.

I've just seen that calls have been added to Whatsapp web! That's great!

I will try it when I can make a call with someone on desktop and with Whatsweb on Ubuntu Touch. I wonder if the later will work with the current web engine, or if we will have to wait for Qt6!

I'm very curious if someone can test!

@jilly @mango

I might add an option later to customize scaling, since you do not agree on whether or not the scaling is good on the same device!

@mango

Ok but I don't understand why you have icons that are that big on your phone in the top panel, in comparaison to my phone.

@mango said in Signal UT: Signal-Desktop for Ubuntu Touch:

By the way, I tried to attach a photo from the camera, but the app crashed after creating the photo. Voice message works well.

Try it again, as mentioned in the description of the app it may happen some times. It's always better to take the photo the normal way, and then load it from the gallery. I think the process of taking a picture diirectly through the camera app in contentHub is slightly buggy.

Looking forward to working menus as well.

If you're talking about the top menu, this will probably not happen soon. But I'm not sure why you would need them.

@mango

Well it does not seem that small to me... Seems kind of similar on my phone (see the screenshot of the app in the openstore: https://open-store.io/screenshots/signalut.pparent-screenshot-80b19203-83e8-473f-a5a8-b79b6ef48e04.png )

It's true that scaling is a bit smaller than whatsweb currently, I might increase it a bit. Maybe other people can share their thought on that.

@mango

Honestly not sure to understand, a screenshot might explain more. The top menu do not work (but are not useful anyway the best is to hide them). Normally the scaling should be good by default but if it isn't please mention what device you are using and the result in the terminal of:

getprop ro.sf.lcd_density

And

echo $GRID_UNIT_PX

@domubpkm

Well I'm not sure but given what I have published above, It could mean that it can only work by design on an un-compromised google certified devices ( I've read that there exists so-called technologies as "Android hardware-backed keystore" and "Trusted Execution Environment" , could the app possibly rely on that? ). So maybe it's not working with microG because they don't want it to, because they want the app to run only on a so-called "safe envieronement" provided by google.

@domubpkm

" Il est également interdit d’utiliser l’application France identité sur un ordiphone Rooté ou Jailbreaké."

“It is also prohibited to use the France Identité app on a rooted or jailbroken smartphone.”

https://france-identite.gouv.fr/conditions-generales-utilisation/

I guess it currently does not work on rooted Android, and on custom Roms, and obviously on Waydroid.