Sailfish Community News, 2nd June, VoLTE roundup

Community News
#1

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Sailfish OS update from Jolla

In the last newsletter we spent a lot of time focussing on the big news event: the release of Sailfish OS 4.4.0.64 for the Xperia 10 III, including its beta VoLTE support.

Over the last fourteen days we’ve been humbled by all of the testing you in the community have been doing with the Xperia 10 III. Bearing in mind that VoLTE wasn’t turned on by default, users from all over the world have been testing out the functionality and filling in the provider support wiki to share their experiences with us.

Most, but not all, users have been testing across Europe: Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, France, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Slovakia and the UK are all represented. But the Sailfish community extends across the world and it’s exciting to see that in addition to these we also have entries for the USA, New Zealand and Hong Kong. When we released the beta we said it was for brave users, and it’s amazing to see the bravery and diversity of the Sailfish community shining through.

If you’re using your Xperia 10 III in a country that doesn’t appear in this list, please consider giving it a go and adding the results to the wiki, to help others know what to expect.

So what of the results? The overall view is positive, if not perfect. There seem to be particular issues with using VoLTE in Italy, Poland, Slovakia and New Zealand. Nevertheless, for a beta test, 17 fully working and 3 mostly working out of a total of 25 providers is an excellent starting point.

Great work from everyone!

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In other news, we enjoyed a lively discussion during the most recent Sailfish Community meeting and especially nice to see such the community so well-represented. The advance questions covered OBS statistics, the VoLTE implementation and progress for Jolla as a company. But we also had some nice discussion about how best to support sharing between applications, grant funding, pipewire and community ports. Don’t forget to suggest your own questions in preparation for the next meeting, and to join us on the 9th June. There’ll be the usual prompt for this at the end of the newsletter as well.

Let’s move straight on to the real reason you’re here: the roundup of everything that’s been happening in the Sailfish code and app repositories.

Repository roundup

The repositories have once again been alive with the sound of merge requests. And dcalste is here to give his expert summary and to explain all of the important changes.

Audio stack

Telephony stack

Calendar stack

  • kf5-calendarcore, the KDE framework library to handle calendar data, dcaliste updated to latest 5.94 upstream version, is bringing a fix to allow the import of ICS data that are missing the UIDs for events.

Network

  • connman, the connection manager, LaakkonenJussi’s work on a better support for traffic routing changes, was tested by *abranson and it fixed his IPv6 connectivity routing issues on mobile data. The pull request is still pending awaiting for approval from other sailors.

  • wpa_supplicant, a set of tools to allow connections to WPA protected wifi networks, thaodan is working on an update from 2.9 to 2.10.

Web browser

Glib libraries

QML

Packaging

Low level

  • libdsme, a library for DSME, the device state management entity, jmlich found a use after free case thanks to recent gcc -Wuse-after-free compilation flag and is proposing a fix for it.

The Linux kernel

SDK, documentation and developper tools

Apps ahoy!

Once again, a whole slew of apps have been updated this fortnight. Here are the apps that sailed through harbour and into the Jolla Store for your consideration. Thanks go to all of the Sailfish OS app developers featured here for keeping their apps healthy and improving in all manner of ways.

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VideoWorks

VideoWorks from Mark Washeim (poetaster) remains both one of the most ambitious and the most effectively realised apps for Sailfish OS. With it you can load in a video clip, select sections of the clip and apply a huge range of different manipulators. Videos can be edited, with pieces of the same or other videos spliced in, cut out or rearranged. Filters can be applied, text overlays added, audio manipulations performed, static images spliced in and more. Changes are ephemeral and revertible until you save out the edited video. If you want to perform any kind of video manipulation on your phone, even if it’s just adding the odd caption your own video recordings, then this is a superb piece of software to have on your phone. In the latest version 0.4.1 Mark has fixed some bugs related to audio recording. It’s available from the Jolla Store, OpenRepos and Chum.

AudioWorks

Mark Washeim (poetaster) maintains a trio of media-manipulation apps: VideoWorks, ImageWorks and AudioWorks. Alongside VideoWorks, AudioWorks also got an update this fortnight, bringing it to version 1.1.0. The latest changes make a number of Sailjail-related adjustments, and preparing the codebase for a future recording features, which we’ll be keen to cover once it arrives. Also known as Audiocut, AudioWorks has a user interface that’s similar to VideoWorks. The big difference being that it’s focussed on audio manipulation rather than video manipulation. Rather than the video preview of VideoWorks, AudioWorks displays the waveform of the sample being manipulated. Besides that, the ribbon interface neatly provides access to cut-and-paste, volume, distortion and a whole host of other functions. It’s another brilliantly-functional and beautifully implemented media manipulation applications, and highly recommended. AudioWorks is available from the Jolla Store, OpenRepos and Chum.

Zimpedia

Zimpedia from Michal Kosciesza (mkiol) has the rather cryptic description of a “ZIM archive offline reader”. In practice, that means you can download offline archives from library.kiwix.org containing the full contents of Wikipedia or other wiki-like sites. There are over a thousand different archives to choose from, from Arch Linux documentation to the ZDoom Wiki. The latest version brings Zimpedia to 3.0, with one of the main changes being a switch from the now-deprecated WebKit viewer to the Sailfish Gecko-based WebView. The app relies on this to display the majority of its content, but with controls nicely tailored to the wiki-content it’s used for. The toolbar at the bottom allows instant switching between light and dark modes, altering the text size and bookmarking of pages. Other changes include an updated LibZIM library for interpreting the ZIM archive contents and enabling Sailjail. The app provides a great way for viewing offline material, but bear in mind that, unsurprisingly ZIM archives can be quite large. If you want to download Wikipedia — including all of the images and media that go with it — for offline viewing you’ll need to allocate around 100 GB of your phone’s storage to it. Zimpedia is available from the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.

Teletext

Although Teletext touched the lives of users all around the world, this Teletext app from Joni Korhonen (pinniini) is specifically aimed at users wanting to view information from Finnish broadcasters YLE and MTV3. These are Finland’s national public broadcaster and main commercial broadcaster respectively, making up the two largest Finnish television broadcasters. If you’ve not used Teletext before, it’s a bit like a centralised precursor to the Web, but where you enter three-digit page numbers to jump to different parts of the site instead of selecting links. Historically these pages were transmitted via the broadcast television network, but the app now downloads the data from the Internet. It’s a rather strange combination of legacy technology viewed through a modern lens. Nevertheless, the Teletext services themselves contain a lot of up-to-date content from a trustworthy source, and as you might expect from such a combination, it escapes many of the trappings of the modern internet: super-fast downloads, minimal distraction, better privacy. And the app UI is surprisingly clean and efficient. If you want to access Finnish Teletext services, then this is a great app for doing just that. The latest version adds Sailjail support and is available from the Jolla Store.

SailTrivia

I’ve never much enjoyed pub-quizzes, primarily because I’m so bad at them. So it came as quite a surprise how much I enjoyed playing SailTrivia, another nice app from Joni Korhonen (pinniini). Although based on the same premise — the app poses questions each with four possible answers for you to choose from — the genius behind the app is the Open Trivia Database that it pulls the questions and answers from. Split across 24 categories and three difficulty levels, it contains over four thousand carefully written and verified questions. With the app you can choose to select questions from either a single category or all categories, and from any or a single difficulty level. An unexpeced gem, the latest update to SailTrivia brings it to version 1.3.0 and adds Sailjail support and is available from the Jolla Store.

Fast Chess

Chess isn’t a game that’s particularly well represented in the Jolla Store, so we can be thankful that Fast Chess from Riku Lahtinen (rikujolla) provides such a nice graphical implementation of the classic board game. Not only does it allow you to play directly on screen with another human player, you can also connect up over the Internet with someone else using the same app (as long as the two devices are connectable endpoints; there’s no signalling or NAT traversal), or play against your phone, courtesy of the open source Stockfish chess engine. The chess board is shown using a plan-view and includes two different piece designs, one of them capturing the Sailfish OS graphical spirit, along with a more traditional representation. And as implied by the title, a chess clock to constrain the game length is included, defaulting to five minutes for each player. I’m not an avid chess player, so I can’t speak to the quality of the Stockfish engine, but it’s ranked as one of the strongest computer chess engines, has 21 levels of skill setting and can also have constraints applied to its movetime. On top of all that, the app also stands in as a chess clock for those who prefer to play sitting at a table using a physical chess board. So perhaps its not so surprising there aren’t so many chess apps when Fast Chess already seems to have the bases nicely covered. Version 0.8.9 provides Sailjail support with some minor bugfixing of the Stockfish mode. It’s available from both the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.

Kaktus

Kaktus is an RSS reader created by Michal Kosciesza?? (mkiol) that supports a variety of different backends. You can hook it up to Netvibes, The Old Reader or Tiny Tiny RSS. It has some competition on Sailfish OS in the form of Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, Tidings, and others. What I found when running it against the Tiny Tiny RSS was a nice clean interface, clean summaries (including images) and nice use of the Sailfish Gecko WebView to provide full-fat viewing. In fact, it’s this shift from WebKit to WebView, along with Sailjail support, which has prompted the latest update. Some of the especially nice features of Kaktus include an offline mode with customisable sync times, Pocket integration, and a generally very customisable experience. The UI is also very thoughtfully presented with clean Sailfish-style icons throughout. As a long-time Tidings user I appreciate the list-oriented UI and graphical flourishes of Kaktus, and if you’re looking for a solid RSS reader Kaktus is definitely worth your consideration. It’s available now at version 3.1.1 from the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.

Tripometer Gpx

Do you like to cycle? If so, then Tripometer from Fredrik Axling (faxling) may be the app you need to keep track of your cycling stats. Using your GPS location, allied with Open Street Map mapping data, Tripometer will record your route, speed, elevation, duration and distance for future reference. I found there were some quirks to the application. The pull-down menu on the main page seems not to respond to taps, which go through to the stats page beneath. Once viewing your route on the map, getting back to the stats page is a little unintuitive: you must first activate the back button by activating the small green left arrow, after which tapping at the top left hand corner of the screen will pop the map off the page stack. Nevertheless, once you’ve got the hang of it, it becomes more straightforward. Perhaps the most important capability is being able to save out and load back in GPX files. The Tripometer user interface may be a bit of an acquired taste, but once you get the hang of it, it contains some rather nice functionality. The latest release brings it to version 2.6.0 and fixes some file load and save bugs. It’s available from the Jolla Store.

Kontroller

The Kontroller app from Julien Blanc (JulienBlanc), with contributions from several others, allows you to control your Kodi media centre. The app will search for servers directly on the network, or you can enter the server details manually to connect up. You’re then presented with a rather clean interface for playing music, without the need to open up a separate Kodi display. The latest version 0.22 doesn’t provide new functionality, but prepares the app for further Sailjail integration. It’s available from both the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.

jTox

We’ve not covered the jTox app in the newsletter before, although the app has been around for several years already. The app — developed by Aleš Katona (almindor) — allows decentralised and potentially secure messages to be sent directly between devices using the Tox protocol. The app comes with prominent warnings about being experimental. It’s aimed at users who want a private, decentralised messaging service, who are usually at the more circumspect end of the spectrum when it comes to security. But the warnings also relates to data usage too, so both are things to bear in mind. In usage, I was expecting things to be far more complex than they turn out to be. Account creation was straightforward, and using the QR code reader built into the Sailfish OS camera I was able to add contacts easily. Messages were received rapidly, with the usual message to indicate the user at the other end is composing their message. The UI is quite simple and rough in places, but perfectly usable. Now up to version 1.4.2, the latest chages tweak the Sailjail permissions to support input and export of accounts. jTox is available from both the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.

Aenigma

Aenigma is a lovely Sudoku puzzle game for Sailfish OS, which we we’ve featured a couple of times now. It provides a whole host of aids for improving your Sudoku experience, including annotations, highlight, undo and more. If you’re looking for a game to while away your idle hours, then you won’t go wrong with this very nicely designed app from Samuel Kron (black_sheep_dev). The latest version brings the app up to 0.4.0 to add Sailjail permissions, and is available from all of the Jolla Store, OpenRepos and Chum.

Please feed us your news

We hope you enjoy this community news, which we’ll continue to refine over the coming months. This is your news, and frankly we can’t always keep up with all the exciting stuff happening in the Sailfish community, so please help us out by replying to this post in the forum if you’d like to see something included.

And do also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. It’s a great place to discuss any of the content you see here, ask questions and share your ideas. The next meeting will be on the 9th June.

15 Likes
Kernel module support 4.4 - on the phone
#2

Great reading und info update again, thank you!
There are two major improvements I like to thank you for in particular:

  • VoLTE on the X 10 III working smoothly with Vodfone and Telekom in DE (had only one small glitch where a call was hold although it was never fully established, needing a reboot - could not reproduce so far because it might be an unlucky timing WRT accepting the call on my side and finishing the call on the other side)

  • and Calender App: a big “thank you” to Damien because all the problmes I had with importing an . ICS file with reoccurring events are solved

2 Likes
#3

Is stuck in the store. It took a while to discover just all the ways a jail can lead you to fail :slight_smile: But ffmpeg changes also made fixes necessary. Oh, and I added gif export. Animated gifs. Yeah!

It’s actually at:

0.4.4 ffmpeg fixes
- storyline and slideshow fixes

0.4.3 Sailjail and gif-o-matic release
- rework python to support sailjail, sailjail settings
- add gif as output format.
4 Likes
#4

It might have been in the community meeting (which I sadly missed), but will Jolla allow their volte work in community ports?

#5

It was indeed covered, and no worries for missing it :slight_smile: The answer is a little complex so I won’t repeat it here, but rather it’s probably best to take a look at the meeting minutes (section 5)

1 Like
#6

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