@UBportsNews
Can you please remind people about the 'community favourite app' awards that will happen toward the end of the year.

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Toward the end of the year we will run the 'community favourite app awards' where we the community votes on our favourite apps for the year. Keep your eyes on what you use daily, pay attention when an app has some great updates and remember all those new apps. youll want all that info for the nominations and voting later.
If you have ideas for fundraising for an award please do offer suggestions. It would be great to have something substantial to give the developers.

@sixwheeledbeast
I guess what I was pointing more toward is that there are situations or people that need a more predictable control panel.
To be clear, I like the panel and the one hand scrolling. Its gorgeous to look at and most of the time its convenient. But it does mean that it is not good in emergencies.
For example:
say I urgently need to:

• Turn on wifi.
  I know to flick down just right of the camera notch, and the toggle is reliably about halfway down the page.
• access system settings.
  I try to flick down from the right top corner but what page I land on is a bit of a lottery. I then need to scroll to adust the pagu before I can do what I need.
  It is even worse for the items to the far left on the menu.

@projectmoon
So I have already have the app suspension disabled but the gps tracking requires that the screen is on. I think I discovered this by trial and error. When I turn the screen off, no tracks are recorded even if it is set to record.
when the screen is on, tracks are recorded.

In anycase, the post is less about the activity tracker issue but more generally about the bigger issue which is 'Can I use the panel reliably in an unexpected emergency?'.

I have a comment about the indicator panel at the top of the phone.

I have a very 'ubuntu touch' use-case that made me think about how the indicator panel is not good for 'urgent' use and can be a hazard for emergencies.

Summary: It is difficult to use the panel quickly and even more difficult when you can't see the screen well.

background:
To use the activity tracker when cycling I need to keep the app open. I use the active screen click to stop the phone from locking screen. To stop the battery from dying after 5 minutes I turn the brightness all the way down and turn off automatic brightness.
To use the phone when I take a break I need to turn the brightness up manually.

Issue:
When the brightness is all the way down, I can't reliably turn the screen brightness up because the scrolling behavior of the panel means the screen 'button' is never in an expected place. With Android I know to swipe down and the buttons are all in a predictable place so even if the screen is dark, I can get the slider with a few attempts.
In UT it is very difficult.

While this came up in a very niche (ubuntu touch-esque) use-case I think it has implications for everyone else in some emergency situations.
Eg. needing to turn on mobile data to make a call if you get an eye injury.

@nbdynl
Directly donating money is always an option but I did try this last year and I got very little engagement from the community.
I had asked for a 'promise to donate' rather than sending the money to anyone so there was effectively no risk for the donors as they would donate to the winner directly.

When I asked for people to dedicate time or effort to create a reward (images, logos, etc), I got much more engagement. This is great but it can't scale well if you want to get more than 5 people contributing to the reward.

@gpatel-fr
I don't know how this platform works so I had no idea that was an option.
This would be by far the easiest way to do this!

i guess this is something that the admin team would need to do.

I would like to run the 'community favourite app' awards again later this year but there are a few things that could have been a bit improved.
One issue was that we didnt have a nice award.

It would be good to gather something meaningful to provide as a reward to the developers. I was thinking to organise a fund raiser of sorts but I dont know what works best in this type of crowd.

What types of fund raising has worked in the past?

I would like to run the 'community favourite app' awards again later this year but there are a few things that could have been a bit improved.
One key issue was how to do the voting with anonymous members.

To have fair elections with a one person-one vote setup we need a way to regulate how often a person votes and thus we need a unique personal (albeit temporary) identifier. Normally this done through government issued IDs but I guess an email serves the same purpose if we dont need to be super strict... but the point is we would rely on an already existing system.

I doubt people in the community would be happy to share IDs, emails etc with a random internet person for the sake of voting.
To use online providers, I would still need to get everyones emails to register them.
Using the forum messaging system gets difficult for lots of voters as it means a lot of manual response collection.

Would a dedicated app provide any benefit? Would the open store be a way to ensure one phone - one vote anonymously? or would I still need to rely on emails etc?

@projectmoon
..... WTF, it wasnt there but now it is!!
Luckily I took a screenshot of when it wasnt there.
How do I share images on the forum?

I just received some NFC tags to play around with today ...
but now I cant find the NFC toggle on the phone.
I remember using it on the 24.04 stable but after upgrading to RC3, I cant find it.

@kugiigi
Hello
So I dont have another phone with display out so I cant test that unfortunately.
I do agree that the hub seems to be what determines what issues I have.

I dont have major issues using any hubs with my asus laptop to charge and display out and the laptop draws more power than the phone.

What hub do you use?

I have been using UB as an adhoc laptop replacement and I have been impressed by how much I can get done with my FP5.

There are some sticking points though and this is one of them.
My phone has issues drawing power when connected to an usb hub and staying connected to the external display.

I had this issue in various forms over the past few months and it is very disrupting for work. Either I need to use the phone until the battery dies, then unplug the phone from the monitors to charge it or (on the occasions where it does charge while connected), I get disconnected while I am working.
Is there anything that can be done to correct this?

For example;
With a wavlink usb hub, I can charge while connected (sometimes) but if I remove the PD cable the monitor disconnects and my session closes.
With a ugreen usb hub, I get no connections if there is power or no power if I plug in PD after connecting to the monitor.
With my dual monitor setup at work, I seem to have no issues but I use this far less frequently. This has my phone connected to a Dell monitor via usb-c and draws power from the monitor.

@pparent
Much appreciated! I think these will be super useful.

@Lakotaubp
Yeah, I think we should add a category for the strangest bug found.

@CiberSheep

Thanks for adding the text. It was on my todo list. I had not got around to it yet.

I would like to add a write up on the community favourite awards to the website. Where is the correct place to put such a page and what is the correct process for adding the page? Should this be done via gitlab? Should I just share it here?

The results are in from the voting!
We have reached the close of the first (ever?) 'Community favourite' awards.

As a quick recap, we had two categories and many nominations. It looks like people were very hungry to acknowledge the work done on UT.
For the community favourite app we had 15 nominees.

OSM scout server
uWolf
Morph QT6
futify
dekko
Sapot
Keeweb
Podcat
RockWork
OpenStore
Waydroid
LogViewer
CinnyUT
TELEports
uNav

For the community favourite developer we had 13 nominees.

@fredldotme (Alfred E. Neumayer)
@lduboeuf (Lionel Duboeuf)
@alan_g (Alan Griffiths)
@vlad-nirky (Vlad Nirki)
@Fuseteam (Tobiyo Kuujikai)
@kugiigi (Kugi Eusebio)
@CiberSheep (Joan CiberSheep)
@thevancedgamer (Muhammad)
@peat_psuwit (Ratchanan)
@danfro (Daniel Frost)
@jonius (Jonathan Zeidler)
(Brian Douglass)
@mariogrip (Marius Gripsgård)

For the community favourite app:
In second place, with 22% of the votes ... The Openstore
The first place and the winner ... is actually a tie with second place ... with 22% of the votes
TELEports.

For the community favourite developer:
In second place, with 22% of the votes ... @peat_psuwit (Ratchanan)
The first place and the winner,
... with 25% of the votes.
@fredldotme (Alfred E. Neumayer)

Congratulations to all the winners and thank you to all the community for keeping UT up and running.
I will be in touch soon with details on how to get your prize.

I have sent a private message to @applee with the outcome of the voting for the Community Favourite Awards.
Please read it at the QA tonight!

@Vlad-Nirky
Thanks, I did not see the double entry.

Hello All
It is now time to vote for the Community Favourite Awards.

UPDATE:
You can have a first and second choice for each category. If you have not indicated so, please send me your second choice. You can vote for yourself too if you were nominated.

Voting closes on the evening of the 10 Dec.

This year we will have only two categories:

• Community favourite app
• Community favourite developer

The prize for each category:

• a large pizza (details TBD).
• a webpage mentioning your award and why your won (details TBD).

Each forum member can vote for a first choice and second choice in each category. More details about the nominees can be found here: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/11623/call-for-nominations-for-the-ubports-community-awards?_=1764437371137

Community favourite app nominees

OSM scout server
uWolf
Morph QT6
futify
dekko
Sapot
Keeweb
Podcat
RockWork
OpenStore
Waydroid
LogViewer
CinnyUT
TELEports
uNav

Community favourite developer nominees

@fredldotme (Alfred E. Neumayer)
@lduboeuf (Lionel Duboeuf)
@alan_g (Alan Griffiths)
@vlad-nirky (Vlad Nirki)
@Fuseteam (Tobiyo Kuujikai)
@kugiigi (Kugi Eusebio)
@CiberSheep (Joan CiberSheep)
@thevancedgamer (Muhammad)
@peat_psuwit (Ratchanan)
@danfro (Daniel Frost)
@jonius (Jonathan Zeidler)
(Brian Douglass)
@mariogrip (Marius Gripsgård)

How to vote

• Decide who you want to vote for.
• Send a private message to me with the vote for each category.
• Clearly mark which is your first choice and which is your second choice.
• You cannot change your vote later

Prizes

Any one who wants to contribute to the prizes or make them more interesting is very very welcome to let us know what they have in mind.