Sailfish Community News, 15th August 2024 - Roundups

Community News
#1

Sailfish OS update from Jolla

In today’s fortnight we are focusing on apps and repository roundups. We’re very happy that Damien Caliste ( dcaliste ) is back with his repository roundup. The app roundup covers a couple of new releases by our dear contributor and blogger David Llewellyn-Jones (flypig).

We’re planning to keep Jolla C2 feedback survey open until 18th August. Filling in the survey takes only a few minutes, and we want to hear from you. You, Sailfish OS community, have been active also in the feedback survey thread itself – thank you for your feedback there as well. We are planning to post similar input/feedback surveys along the Sailfish 5 journey. Surely, occasionally we shall do it openly here at forum. Point being is that your input matters. Let’s keep on working together.

Repository roundup

Summer period, while calmer than the rest of the year in term of development, has been filled up with interesting changes. Next Sailfish OS version will see a modernized connman , better aligned with its upstream development. flypig, rainemak and other contributors are actively closing issues after issues for an upgrade of the browser to Gecko ESR 91. Changes to support new devices are also visible under the hood, like mal’s work to adapt to Android 14, pvuorela modifications to UI for devices with cutout display, or even low-level adjustments by spiiroin to abstract device specific behaviours.

Communication bits

Sailfish browser

  • embedlite-components, QML components for the browser, rainemak replaced deprecated calls as required by flypig 's work on upgrading the browser to ESR 91.
  • sailfish-components-webview, the high-level QML components exposing a web page, rainemak added a new argument for ESR 91 to the createView() method. flypig opened a pull request to test the webview with ESR 91 and started discussing the required changes.

Multimedia framework

User interface

Low level libraries

Developer’s corner

App roundup

Today we’re only going to cover a couple of new releases. Not because there haven’t been more releases since the last newsletter, but rather because there’s already too much to say about these two nice apps as it is.

apps
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The first is the enigmatically named 36 Questions by Mirian Margiani (ichthyosaurus). The icon for the app shows a heart overlaid with a question mark, which immediately leads to questions about what the app is all about. But questions about its purpose remain, even after you’re well into the process of playing the game. As will become clear, it’s not really a game. And provoking difficult questions is what the app is all about. I’m just not sure that “what is this app about?” is intended to be one of those questions.

Let’s try to make sense of it all. The app is based on a paper written by Arthur Aron, Edward Melinat, Elaine N. Aron, Robert Darrin Vallone and Renee J. Bator and published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin of April 1997. Back then there were questions swirling around about whether friendships could ever be properly studied in an experimental setting.

In the study, the team of researchers demonstrated that pairs of participants showed “greater postinteraction closeness” after completing 36 deep and meaningful questions, compared to a control group that answered 36 questions of a less intimate nature. Or, to put it another way, discussion about personal and introspective topics generated increased closeness compared to small-talk.

The “36 Questions” app takes the questions from the study and wraps them up in a very effective and nicely produced app that carefully lead you through the process.

So does it work? In the name of science and the need for newsletter content I took it upon myself to answer the questions with my wife of nearly 25 years. After having read the description on the Jolla store this felt like the right thing to do. But our experience was that we didn’t learn much new about each other. In hindight having read a little of the research and after reading the description more carefully, I realise now that my wife was the wrong person to do this with. The questions are better targeted at strangers, or people who at least don’t know each other very well.

The questions are supposed to take 45 minutes to get through, so we’re not into speed-dating territory. And in truth, for the questions to work I expect there would need to be mutual and honest agreement between both parties from the start. So this isn’t a way to trick someone into liking you. But as long as everyone involved knows what they’re letting themselves in for and are happy to participate, then the app actually offers a great way to get to know someone better.

All 36 questions — split into three sets of 12 — are taken directly from the publication. But in the publication the authors also list the 36 small-talk questions that were used as a control. It begs the question whether we can expect to see these more banal questions appear in a later update to the app?

Either way, this is a fascinating addition to both the Jolla Store and OpenRepos. I wouldn’t pin your hopes on it if you’re looking for a quick route to finding the ideal partner, but if you get the timing right, I can see how it could be a good way to get to know someone more intimately.

Asking a very different set of questions is the Bugger app. Created by Peter G. (nephros) but as a team effort in collaboration with the Bug Coordination Team, the Bugger app provides a brilliant way to improve the quality of your Sailfish OS bug reporting. And if anyone knows how to write a good but bug report, it’s the members of the Bug Coordination Team. The team have been tirelessly working through bugs on the forum checking their reproducibility and ensuring all the required details are given. And while this is valuable work, there’s also something to be said for nudging users into providing all of the right information from the start.

The Bugger app helps with this by providing a series of fields for users to fill out. Things like the steps to reproduce the bug, any preconditions, plus an automatically generated indication of third-party installs that covers Patchmanager, OpenRepos and Chum.

Not only does the app provide the fields to complete, it will also tell you if the bug is missing important information or doesn’t reach the quality threshold for consideration. It takes some of the more routine tasks of the Bug Coordination Team and formalises them, leaving the team to focus on the trickier parts of judging bug quality, such as checking actual reproducibility.

I’d urge anyone thinking of posting a bug report on the forum to start their journey with this app. Not only will it make your life easier, it’ll also make your report more actionable, to the benefit of everyone.

Bugger is available from both OpenRepos and Chum with version 0.9.10 being the latest available.

So there you have it. Quite contrasting apps today, but both brilliant in their own way. Hopefully you’re still enjoying your summer and if you’re an app developer we’re always looking forward to seeing the brilliant outcome of all your hard work.

Please feed us your news

Nice to see repository roundup back from well deserved summer break! As always, please do not hesitate to share your ideas, thoughts, or suggestion for future newsletter topics. This is your news!

Please do also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. Next community meeting will be on the 22nd August .

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#2

Isn’t it a task for a medical doktor to write a “good but(t) report”? :wink: :laughing:

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#3

It just goes to show @eson that you can never proofread something too many times! :flushed:

While I’m replying, I take my hat off to Damien for his exellent repository roundup. Always an enjoyable read and I always learn so much from it.

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#4

Thank you @flypig for your appreciation. I’m happy you learn things by reading the digest. That’s also a large part of my motive to do it : learn new things. By doing it, I discover libraries or tools I didn’t know they existed before and sometimes they are of interest for me for various other reasons. Sometimes I wonder how changes are done and go looking at the diff, learning new methods or practices. And I’m feeling good that it’s also interesting to other people.

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#5

WRT Repository Roundup, this one and in general.

:+1: to both statements, e.g. farstream / farstream · GitLab

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#7

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