In continuation of our last roundup, a lot of repositories (several tens) have seen the creation of a new upgrade-4.4.0 branch. This has often been used to backport fixes from the development branch to a given Sailfish OS version, precluding (or not) a hot fix release like the 4.4.0.64 that happened a bit after 4.4.0.58 was out. A majority of these new branches have received a simple submodule URL change, but some has actually seen a backport commit like connman repo for instance.
ffmpeg, a framework to encode and decode multimedia resources, following a forum question and a discussion during a community meeting, abranson enabled the compilation for support of ALAC codec.
ssu, the seamless software updater, abranson's pull request to ensure that user-added repositories will not override system ones has been merged in.
ofono, the telephony framework, Flohack74 is proposing a patch to raise the current hard-coded limit of 999 cell broadcast channels. Channels with higher numbers can actually be in use, like 4384 for emergency alerts in Taiwan for instance.libcommhistory, the library to access SMS/phone history, thaodan partially reverted a previous change to restore old notification categories still used by some applications.
connman, the connection manager, LaakkonenJussi's work on better support for traffic routing changes has been merged and also backported to aupgrade-4.4.0branch.
ohm-plugins-misc, some plugins inherited from Nokia for the open hardware manager (OHM), jusa fixed an issue with initial audio routing being undefined before a route is set.
libconnman-qt, QML bindings for the connection manager, herrie82 upgraded the source code base to be able to compile with Qt6 and the patch was merged.nemo-qml-plugin-dbus, QML bindings for DBus, pvuorela is proposing an alternative to the pull request initiated by herrie82 which adapts the code for more recent versions of Qt.
nemo-qml-plugin-calendar, the QML for calendar access, dcaliste's proposed change in the importation logic to allow organisers to be discarded has been accepted. With the patch, imported event can drop attendees.mkcal, storage backend using SQLite for calendar entries, the change in alarm handling for recurring events, fixing duplicated alarms for exceptions by dcaliste has been merged, with a quick follow-up to fix a mistake in the original patch.
user-managerd, daemon for handling Sailfish OS device users, martyone is proposing some corrections for the documentation.qtscenegraph-adaptation, , krnlyng fixed the issue investigated on the forum by poetaster where images are rendered with a bluish tint.
sailfish-browser, the browser application itself, rainemak commented on dcaliste's pull request to introduce a long-tap in the tab list view for house-keeping actions such as tab deletion. mikaela opened a feature request to discuss possible support for progressive web applications (PWAs). Notice that PWAs are only fully supported by Chromium at the moment with partial support for Firefox on Android but not on desktop.
libgrilio, a GLib-based library to interface with RIL, slava fixed a parallel build issue caused by incorrect dependencies in theMakefile.
sdk-setup, scripts, configurations and utilities to build the Sailfish OS SDK, vigejolla got a patch merged to useprofile.d/scripts to customize Bash in SDK. martyone created two pull requests to polish bash completion handling in the SDK, one to automatically load bash completion and one to drop deprecated completions formb2andsdk-assistant. martyone also updatedsdk-manageto use tarball metadata to look up tooling.sb2-config, scratchbox2 crosscompiling environment, martyone pushed two commits so that sb2-config can list targets without one being specified, and also one commit to properly find the default target from$HOME/.scratchbox2/config, if none is provided.sdk-build-tools, scripts used to build the Sailfish SDK in its production environment, martyone created a patch to attach metadata to the generated archive file.rust, the memory safe programming language, lbt is proposing to useprjconfto disable armv7 or aarch64 builds.docs.sailfishos.org, website sources, various changes in the documentation were accepted or proposed:
- rainemak corrected the release date for 4.4.0.64,
- olf's proposal to make formatting changes to the newly introduced release page has been accepted.
- martyone is proposing to introduce a new page for developers explaining how to contribute to the API documentation.
sailfish-qdoc-template, templates for QDoc adapted to Sailfish OS, martyone modified the configuration to ensure linking between projects. He also modified the packaging to add the HTML documentation of the project itself.
Post scriptum : Summer (currently in the northern hemisphere) is often the period for vacations and I'll be off for some time. I'll still be looking at GitHub news and forum discussions from time to time but I'll not be able to write these digests. If anyone would like to replace me for a while, please feel free to do it and contact @flypig to add it to the community letter. Otherwise, you should be able to read the next repo digest on 25th August. Enjoy the summer!
Once again it's great to see the updated apps rolling in. It's great to be seeing such rapid updates for some of these apps, with improved functionality added. But it's also great to see some new apps that we've not seen before. Read on to find out more.
Zollstock is an app that we covered for the first time in last fortnight's newsletter. Even on its first release it was a really solid piece of software, so it's great to see it being udpated so quickly. Zollstock allows you to measure things. Not just any measurement of course, but specifically distance measurement. Not only does it turn your phone into a quite usable ruler, it even adds tools to allow you to easily measure distances that extend beyond the height of your phone.
The app bumps up to version 0.1.4 with updates to the translations. This new version from Samuel Kron (black_sheep_dev) is available from the Jolla Store OpenRepos.
With Twitter in the news recently for being bought by Elon Musk... or not as the case may be... it's nice to see Sailfish continues to benefit from the wonderful Piepmatz Twitter client from Sebastian Wolf (WerkWolf). Piepmatz providees a fully-featured client with all of the options you might hope for: tweeting, replying, retweeting, favouriting, following, unfollowing! Images and videos are fully catered for, and overall it provides a smooth and usable Twitter experience.
Previous updates to the app unfortunately broke support for conversation threads in the app, but Sebastian has fixed this in this latest update to version 1.12. The update also restores access to removable media. Given how long Sebastian has been supporting the app, and how many features he's managed to pack in, it's great to see Piepmatz continuing to receive updates.
Piepmatz is available from both the Jolla Store and OpenRepos..
Stopmotion is a new app release from prolific app author and maintainer Mark Washeim (poetaster). As its name suggests, it turns your phone into a tool for creating stop motion videos: think "Shaun the Sheep" or "Isle of Dogs". Having already heard a lot about the app in the forums I was eager to try it out. It was hard for me to imagine what a Stopmotion app would actually do.
On trying it, I was pleasantly surprised, not just by its simplicity, but also by its effectiveness. It genuinely streamlines some of the challenges associated with stop motion photography. On opening the app you're presented with a simple configuration panel in which you can set the delay between shots, a folder to save the resulting images in and some camera details. Plus there's an ominous looking button at the bottom right. Pressing this starts and stops the capture sequence.
The app provides an appropriately satisfying click when it takes a shot, and if you've set your delay correctly you'll have enough time to update the items in your frame ready to take the next shot in the sequence.
It's all surprsingly straightforward. Of course while the app may give you the tools, you'll have to provide the brilliant story and saintly patience yourself. And you'll probably need a tripod to make best use of the app too.
Stopmotion is a brilliant addition to the Jolla Store, and you'll also find it in OpenRepos.
Patience Deck is another app that's been enjoyuing regular updates from its author Tomi Leppänen (tomin). If you're a regular reader of the newsletter you'll konw that it allows you to play a variety of different single player or "Solitaire" card games. Early releases supported 45 different variants, which was then increased to 72. The latest updates bumps this up even further so that it now offers 81 different games in total. That's a lot of game.
The aptly named Sir Tommy is one of the new variants included. You start the game with a shuffled stack of cards (the stock), four empty discard piles and four empty foundation piles. Each card taken from the stock must be placed either on a foundation pile in sequencer (from Ace upwards), or into one of the discard piles in any order. The catch is that you can't rearrange or move the cards in the discard piles, except to put them onto the foundation. It's a challenging variant where you constantly feel the constraints of having only four discard piles. But at the same time it also feels fair, given you're given relative freedom about how to place your cards in the discard piles.
At the other end of the spectrum is Pileon, which feels fery different to the classic Klondlike-like game of Sir Tommy. You're presented with thirteen piles of four cards and two empty piles. You can move any card to any other pile, as long as it's of the same value as the top card in the pile, and as long as the pile doesn't contain more than four cards. Once again, it's the constraints that make the game. You can see all of the cards, so in theory you can solve the game without moving a single card. But that's a blessing and a curse, because it means that the entire game is defined by your very first move.
Alongside these two new games you'll also find severn further new variants: Block Ten, Cover, Eight Off, Fourteen, Gypsy, Labyrinth and Straight-Up. And there are also new features too. Particularly nice is the fact that the app saves its state across restarts, so you don't have to worry if your game doesn't quite fit into a single bus journey. You can also now search the game list, a rather essential addition given the number of games that are now available.
Patience Deck is a brilliant app that gets better with every release. Version 0.9 is available now from from the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.
SeaPrint and Patience Deck are now fighting each other for the award of "most frequenly updated app". While both apps are excellent in their own way, they also couldn't be more diffrerent. SeaPrint is the ultimate home-offce productivity app, allowing you to print hard copies of all your important documents and photos directly from your phone.
Developed and maintained by attah, SeaPrint will find networked printers and allow you to send files directly to them. It's beautifully simply while also being ruthlessly efficient.
The latest version manages to further improve the way documents are printed, ensuring duplex printing flips pages appropriately, and image orientation metadata is better respected. That means that you'll be more likely to get the output from your printer that you're expecting, which has to be a good thing.
Version 1.1.7 of SeaPrint is now available from the Jolla Store, with the SeaPrint Share Plugin — which allows it to integrate nicely with other apps — available on OpenRepos.