Hey, so you mean something like FaceTime. That would be great! I would like to take a look on this task after I have finished E2E encryption for FluffyChat

Hey, another simple design proposal: Make the indicators menu a little bit transparen.

The menu is "over" the current app. The user can use this menu without leaving his app. With a transparent effect, it feels more like that he is still in his app and just makes a quick action at the top menu. Also he could still get some information about a change in the current app, for example: I want to look at the calender but in my messenger is a new message. Maybe it is to dark to read the message, but I can see that:

-There has something changed
-The message is very long or very short

For more asthetic: A light blur effect could be a nice eye candy.

Hey, rebooting on the Nexus 5 can have multiple causes. For example the software is broken. Then you are still able to boot into the bootloader. Hold the power down button and the power button for 10 seconds. Then you can flash your phone with the UBports installer.

Another problem can be a hardware problem. The power button can be damaged and is always sending a "triggered" signal and so the phone is rebooting all the time. Sometimes you can fix this by doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJLImMtumKA
And when this is no longer working, then you can still buy a repair set and try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doPuXkQTGbc

Most problems on the nexus 5 are very easy to repair.
Have fun with your phone

Hey guys. I was thinking about scopes the last days. I know the most of you are thinking that they are deprecated but Im not 100% sure that this is right.

Maybe you know it, maybe not, the amazon fire tablet with the opensource fire os has also something like scopes. It looks and feels very similiar to the ubuntu phone scopes but on the fire tablets they are working very well as you can see here: https://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/fire-new-tablet.jpg

The question is: Why?

I think the reason is: The scopes are a place where you can DISCOVER something, not where you want to reach a specific content. On the fire tablet you just go through books, videos, games, like in a store where you can see interesting things but you dont want to buy something specific. And every time you go to this scopes, you can discover something new. Thats why they work. On the Ubuntu Phone, you have the gallery scopes where only the images are, you already own. They dont change without your action so you dont can discover there something. So the gallery scope is just useless like the most other scopes. You need scopes where you can discover NEW things. Thats why the nearby scope was a good idea I think.

The advantage of this system is: You dont have to check 10 apps for something new. You could say, that you have push notifications for this but if you are following 1000 People on a social media, you dont want to have a notification for each new post. But maybe you want to take a look on the posts from the last five minutes without opening the app. And you dont want to have a notification for each article of the new york times but you want to read through all the titles sometimes.

But you dont need a summary of all pictures you have on the phone. They are nothing new.

What I want to say: We do not necessarily have to do away with scopes. We just need BETTER scopes which offer something new to discover and which makes fun and dont just show a list of content that's on the phone.

So in an ideal world you are on your scopes and see all your apps. You swipe to the next scope where you can see whats new in the new york times, on the next scope you see microblog posts from something like twitter, facebook or mastodon. On the next you see pictures posted from friends on something like instagram or pixelfed. And on the next scope you see new articles from your RSS feeds.

Or another idea: We could write a tool which creates a scope from a rss url.

So in conclusion: The scopes can be very awesome if they focus on "discovering new things which are INTERESTING for the user". They have potential, which we should keep and not kick away. The problem is that facebook would never create an Ubuntu Touch facebook scope and we can not use an API for this but we should see this as potential for the future when in 2-3 years everyone is using Ubuntu Touch (yes, I am VERY optimistic :-P)

Sorry to bother you again with a crazy idea, which I would like to share with you

The current situation is: If you want to have a web app, you are installing it from the OpenStore. That means someone needs to create this webapp (for example with the webapp creator) and publish it. So the OpenStore is providing a list of webapps which are mostly bookmarks with the following informations:
Name, URL, icon, permissions, Headerbar or not.

Some big companies like Google are working on "Progressive web apps" since a couple of years. That means that a website can now have a manifest with informations like this:

{
  "short_name": "Maps",
  "name": "Google Maps",
  "icons": [
    {
      "src": "/images/icons-192.png",
      "type": "image/png",
      "sizes": "192x192"
    },
    {
      "src": "/images/icons-512.png",
      "type": "image/png",
      "sizes": "512x512"
    }
  ],
  "start_url": "/maps/?source=pwa",
  "background_color": "#3367D6",
  "display": "standalone",
  "scope": "/maps/",
  "theme_color": "#3367D6"
}

This allows us in theory to check if a website IS a web app and we have all informations to generate the webapp without user interaction automatically.

Also progressive web apps are supporting web push notifications which are in theory compatible with UBports push service, but thats another task...

But still someone needs to publish it to the OpenStore...

For this I see two solutions:

1. Provide a "Add-to-homescreen" button in the browser. Then the user can search by himself and install webapps like he want. This is the common way on Android now.

2. And this is my new idea: Create a webapp search engine for the OpenStore! Something like if the user is searching for "Google maps", the OpenStore will perform a web search (duckduckgo? Searx?) for "Google Maps" and will check the results for a webapp manifest and if they have one, it will become a search result. I would assume that this search could also be made client side so the OpenStore doesn't need to save any data about this. Of course it should be visible, that these results are done with a web search so the OpenStore is not responsible if it shows illegal web apps.

So what do you think? Is this even possible or a good idea?

What will be the future of the Ubuntu UI Toolkit (Ubuntu Components)? Will it get a new maintainer or will it become deprecated? Are Qt Quick Controls the future? For app developers its important to know which toolkit is best to use for the future

That's looking awesome
Would be so cool to have a PinePhone, a PineBook AND a PineTab for daily use and all of them with the same Ubuntu Touch OS

Sorry but that's not possible in UT. A lot of pages are containing listviews with list items which you can swipe in both directions for contextual actions.

@bhdouglass I fully agree with you. Also I think that Ubuntu Touch still stays unique because of the launcher on the left side and the top menu. But it looks like there are a lot of different opinions about this topic and I dont want that the community splits so maybe we should make it easy to install different "homescreens" from the OpenStore which replaces automatically the current one. Like installing an android launcher. The dash button then will just point to another app, which can not be closed, and in the settings you can set which app should be the homescreen. So everyone can costumize his Ubuntu Phone in his/her own way and the most popular "homescreen" can become the default.

@bhdouglass I love it. In my opinion it is much nicer than the app drawer. It is clean, simple and familiar for users from Android or iOS.
I have two ideas: Instead of widgets like on android, the icons could access the informations from the circle lock screen (or we create a new API for this) and show this informations in the icons, when they are placed on the grid. For example the messages app would be the normal logo and after two seconds the logo will disappear and only the background will stay with a tiny font:

"4 SMS
sent today"

The weather app will show the actuall weather like:
"3° and
rain"

A little bit like the dynamic tiles from Windows Phone. It wouldn't be too much informations because the user can only place one page full of those dynamic icons.

And my second idea for convergence would be to make the app launcher forced to be maximized and greyed, when it is not selected. So it would look like the menu in Endless OS: https://distrowatch.com/images/cgfjoewdlbc/endlessos.png

Edit: Another thing for the favourites: In the homescreen you have favourites at the bottom and you have docked apps in the launcher. We could combine them, so every app docked in the launcher will automatically a favourite app at the bottom of the homescreen to make this more logical and easier to access from everywhere in the system.

Edit 2: Of course also app folders would be nice and a global search bar at the top, which can also search stuff from the internet with for example duckduckgo or wikipedia

Sorry, I'm just thinking loud. I really like your work!!

Btw. this should also work fine with uMatriks and any other possible Matrix Client on Ubuntu Touch

I have currently no idea how to solve this. Only know that iOS doesnt have a global back button too...

@stefwe okay, Signal isn't using a background service. Dekko does. But backgroundservices are always problematic because they could grill your battery

Sorry but that's not possible in UT. A lot of pages are containing listviews with list items which you can swipe in both directions for contextual actions.

@stefwe I guess only with a background service like in the signal app until the Threema developers are going to support Ubuntu Touch by themself.

@poVoq I've tried to make the GUI independent from the rest. So I think a lot of UI components can be reused for this. From a UX perspective you should note that the message bubbles are an own creation and there are system bubbles which you can see in the telegram app and the messages app which would fit more in a new messaging app but the other parts could be useful for this.

@tuxus You can test it with this build of Content Hub: https://janian.de/index.php/s/k5Gt2FQCfyeK73Y

Steps to test:

1. Download the 4 .deb files and push them to your phone
2. On your phone mount in write mode with:

sudo mount -o remount,rw /

3. Install the deb files on your phone with:

sudo apt install ./*.dev --reinstall

4. Reboot your phone

@tuxus no. Just wanted to share, that this solves it for me. But removing a check like this, where we have no idea what it does, can be dangerous. Ever played Mikado?

I was able to fix the content hub bug by just removing these lines:
https://github.com/ubports/content-hub/blob/f0d91e8ad42536486fa291f8ede3964f8bb75c53/src/com/ubuntu/content/detail/transfer.cpp#L187-L191

I don't know how important this check is for the other devices but now on my phone I can send files in FluffyChat and Teleports from the gallery without any problems.

Great. I was thinking about this too. What about creating Qml Plugins out of these so we can use git submodules to get updates from upstream and we dont need to copy them 1000x times. Or we create Debian packages and add them to the system image?