Hello list I love my Ubuntu phone, but there are still some glaring deficiencies in the APIs, frameworks and lifecycle management which cause frustrations for users and developers. I thought it would be fun to set a challenge to the devs: can the infrastucture be improved so the app described below beomes possible to implement...?
--- The app is an ebook reader, and should be capable of displaying books in a variety of formats (epub, txt, mobi etc). It should also have a text-to-speech engine, and the displayed text should follow the text-to-speech engine in real time. These things are relatively trivial to implement. However, some things are not so easy to achieve on Ubuntu: 1) It should be possible to add books from internet sites such as Project gutenberg 2) It should be possible to add books via USB cable from computer 3) It should be possible to add books via Bluetooth from another device 4) It should be possible to add books over WiFi from computer 5) It should be possible to store or add books from an SD card 6) Text-to-speech should continue when screen is off and... 7) ...displayed text should be updated to match the location of text-to-speech when the screen comes back on 8) The reading position should not be lost if the app is closed when text-to-speech is running 9) It should be possible to sync the library, reading positions etc to a central source 10) It should be possible to cut and paste from books in the app Taking these in turn: 1) Good progress has been made in allowing the web browser to download arbitrary filetypes. As app developers, we need simple and understandable documentation on how we can use content-hub (or whatever) to expose these files to our apps. I don't think the documentation on Content Hub is clear or comprehensive enough, and I see that view echoed on the IRC channels. it isn't clear whether content hub is _capable_ of dealing with these filetypes. 2) (i) Transfers over MHL are restricted to folders such as "Documents". A confined app cannot see these directories. It is not possible to add a file to the confined app's data directory over MHL, nor is it trivial to move a file from Documents to the app data dir using File Manager (see bug #1521292). (ii) MHL appears to baulk at some file types. I will need to experiment to see if it is even _possible_ to transfer .epub files etc. 3) Bluetooth does not seem to work for file transfer yet, if it works at all 4) Something like Aquarius's WiFi Transfer app could help here, but has the same caveats as (2), where one unconfined app cannot directly put data somewhere useful to another unconfined app, and documentation of Content Hub is missing as per (1) 5) There is no mechanism for an unconfined app to read or write to the SD card 6) There is no mechanism for audio to be prepared and sent to the speaker "on-the-fly" when screen is off. At present, a large buffer of audio would need to be prepared and sent to media-hub by the TTS engine. When that buffer was exhausted, audio would stop 7) If that buffer had been sent to media-hub, followed by the screen turning off, when the screen turns back on there would be no way for the app to know the reading location and update the displayed text accordingly 8) ditto 9) File sync is missing 10) Is this working for html apps now? --- I would be interested to hear thoughts and strategies on how to take this forward and make Ubuntu better. Cheers NMP -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
