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)

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?

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,

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.

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.

@mihael said:

@pparent Definitely. In the first releses of beta, sound quality was awfull both on desktop and UT. Now the sound quality is good on both. So I think that it was not something related to UT.

Great to hear, I will try it again myself when I have the opportunity!

@naz.r

I have a quick question, is there a reason why you start your app with XWayland rather than Wayland?

Starting the app like this allows to start it in Wayland mode. It seems to work fine. Normally it should possibly allow to improve performances although I've not tested that. I also allows to have the correct icon of your app in the left taskbar.

Thank you!

export GDK_BACKEND=wayland
export DISABLE_WAYLAND=0
export OZONE_PLATFORM=wayland
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
export WAYLAND_DISPLAY=${WAYLAND_DISPLAY:-wayland-0}

export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1
export DCONF_PROFILE=/nonexistent

gpuoptions="--use-gl=egl --enable-gpu-rasterization --enable-zero-copy --ignore-gpu-blocklist --enable-features=UseSkiaRenderer,VaapiVideoDecoder,ThreadedAnimation --disable-frame-rate-limit --disable-gpu-vsync --enable-oop-rasterization --enable-threaded-compositing"
sandboxoptions="--no-sandbox --disable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations " 
waylandoptions="--ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform"

 ./app/merezhyvo $gpuoptions $sandboxoptions $waylandoptions

By the way I should mention that Whatsnew and Signal UT, currently do not work anymore on 24.04-1.x daily, i.e the daily builds of the development version of UT.

I've posted a bug report here:
https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/core/lomiri/-/work_items/177

I hope we can find a fix before next UT release, even if it's not guarantied.

@mihael

Nice did the quality improve since the first tests?

@vishcompany

Read the tip and tricks section!

Next version of the app will focus on:

-Allowing to customize scaling/zoom factor of the app.
-Adjusting layout of the in-call panel ( harder cos I need to make calls while working to test it ).

@mihael
By the way I just noticed that spell check can be removed in the app settings, in conversation settings.

@vishcompany said:
15 minutes ago

I'd like to change the function of the return key from send to new line. I guess it's hidden somewhere in the menus.

No it's not a feature offered by Signal Desktop. There is no interesting feature in the top bar menu, everything is in the left menu. You can acheive what you want by expanding the editing area by typing on the small arrow.

@mihael said:

Just a humble request: the textbox for entering the text has check spelling enabled but I guess that is for English and, since I use a different language, all the words have a red underline - could the spellcheck be disabled? Again, no hurry, thank you for everything! Your app allows me to use UT as a daily driver!

I can't reproduce for me spellcheck is in the language of my phone (French), can you check if all the language parameters of your phone are correct?

I'm not sure if is possible to disable spellcheck easily.

I've released version 0.1.5

Here are the improvements:

-Fix small bugs when using "Enter" to send message
-Fix Search contact in new conversation
-Fix possibility to input password with keyboard
-Adapt Lockscreen layout to mobile screen
-Make the app work again after Unlocking it
-Adapt layout of call panel allowing to select between voice call and video call
-Fix layout of microphone permission dialog to fit with small screens.

Don't hesitate to report if everything works for you!