Sailfish Devember 3.0

Applications
#1

It is soon that time of year again.

Devember is a challenge you take up. It is an excuse for programming, for learning to code and for sharing it.

devember.org

This is my challenge to you, and to myself, to step up and improve the everyday usability of Sailfish OS.
…or just to get started developing, your choice!

My last Devember project sort of spiralled out control and has been in constant progress almost ever since, so perhaps I don’t need the kick in the rear of publicly promising to develop. Maybe i should even take an inverse Devember…

However, i’d love to see what others might get up to, and I’d be interested in taking up a collaborative project. So what i can promise is to make myself available for questions and suggestions for new developers just starting out. I’m by no means an expert in SFOS app development - more a proof of that if you apply yourself, it will work out.

  • What apps are missing in the Sailfish OS ecosystem? - Can we do something about it together?
  • Has your favourite app become orphaned and gone out of maintenance?

What will you make?

See you in #sailfishos at freenode

Edit:
Just a friendly reminder; this is not a general feature wishlist thread.
Please try and keep the conversation to pledging your time, looking for collaborators etc.
With that said, discussion on priorities is relevant… but likely following an offer of time and effort.

9 Likes
QML: Finding object by `objectName` in JavaScript
Sailfish Devember
#2

While i cant code -and every time i tried it was a disaster- i have some ideas for apps that are missing or have been sadly abandoned.

  • A Discogs app would be cool to have for all the people collecting music. It has an open api AFAI understand.
  • The Tuner app we have has been abandoned since it was completed and has some issues. Its kind of hard to tune with -the needle jumps around alot- it could be freshened up a bit when it comes to graphics, would be nice to be able to lock the note you are tuning and has some other issue here and there.
  • A kick ass Image editing app is also needed i think. (or i havent seen any in the shop)
1 Like
#3

I love this idea. Unfortunately I have only ever coded in HTML.

The following would make me happy:

-Would someone take up the development of the Sailbook (facebook) app? Autocorrect doesn’t work, you can’t see what you wrote farther up in a comment, videos don’t load well, webpages don’t load well (give the option to open in external browser?).

-Could the community help the guy out that is working on NextCloud Talk?

-Could the native messaging app be modernized? You can’t send an image or other file from within a conversation and there are no emoticons. Apple gives me the ability to create my own avatar, etc.

-It would be great if nextcloud would be fully supported with apps that are needed. There is a note app, drive app, and some other native apps automatically sync with next cloud. That is great! However, I would love it if there were an app for document editing. For example Collabora Office (open source).

If there is any place where I can learn programming, I’d be happy to get some pointers. I will be starting from scratch (or HTML), though. What languages do I need to be able to create a Sailfish App?

Cordially,
Martin Book

1 Like
#4

You know what, the frontend language, QML, isn’t all that different (in concept) from HTML. You declaratively put up your view and components, and then you can use JavaScript to perform various actions.

Once you are familiar with that, you can graduate to making your own C++ backend components. But bear in mind that it is not a requirement for making something useful. 3 out of my 5 apps are pure QML, and one has very limited C++ use. Even if it is a language i know reasonably well, i prefer to keep things simple, and if i can get away with it, pure QML and JavaScript is quicker.

Just downloading the IDE and deploying either of the sample apps is a great start. (There is one in pure QML, and one with just a C++ loader and the same sample QML) Then you can poke around in them and change things to learn what they do.

I certainly recommend you start small, i.e. find something that has a small REST (or similar) api and some info content that you want to present in native format. That’s what all my apps are, so maybe i’m a bit stuck in my ways. By all means make something purely local if you want.

The official QML tutorial is here, and may be of some help too: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qml-tutorial1.html

BTW, regarding the messages app… It is closed source and this not something we can improve on. Agreed, attaching things from inside it would be neat. Emojis are on their own keyboard layout, which is a good solution, but the selection is too limited. Avatars would require using a service that has that concept, and honestly i don’t even know what ones are supported where that is relevant. XMPP maybe?

1 Like
#5

https://openrepos.net/content/planetosstore/imageworks

3 Likes
#6

Probably the single best feature.
Emoticons, and especially animated ones should be globally disable-able.
They are a major pain in Skype now.

#7

Yes, best would be improving the Nextcloud parts. Talk is one I’d really like to see fully functional, and @blizzz, the dev of that app, belongs to Nextcloud staff as far as I remember. So perhaps with combined power some results might be possible (and sorry, I’m no dev at all).
Besides Talk the most needed apps would be tasks and notes. (In a first step it would be very nice if we could at least see tasks or deck items in calendar.)

A working compass app would also be nice to my mind.

And we have three Telegram apps (Depecher, Telegra’me, Fernschreiber)…

Does anybody know about the implementation of webdav accounts into the system? Thst was one of the promised features for Sailfish 3, but is still missing.

1 Like
#9

Another thing that many tried to do but noone completed the process is an over the air “suite” to control various functions of the phone. Through a web browser that is. Its a long standing idea, many apps appeared, all of them lacking features, functionality and being a bit cumbersome to use.

SSHing in the phone is fine and all but a command line isn’t the most user friendly way of operating a computer.

#10

I’ve been thinking about such an app a while ago but as I rarely use wifi with my phone it would have to be more like an external website/service than just an app which is (I guess) not what other people want.

#11

Is there existing guide on “Howto: ‘Hello world’ on SFOS” or someone willing to make one? I’m not too experienced coder and I have zero experience in making mobile apps/programs so I don’t even know where I should start if I wanted ever try something out.

1 Like
#13

Your link is broken. lmgtfy is not very nice to post to people. Asking for recommendations on which, if any, tutorial to follow is very reasonable.

My suggestion for getting started is, as per the post above, to deploy the sample app(s) from the SDK, and start playing around. Then set a (small) goal and find the steps needed. Then pester me and others on IRC until it works :slight_smile:

I myself don’t have any tutorials in fresh memory, but here are some resources that should be good:

https://sailfishos.org/wiki/Application_SDK_Your_First_App


The videos are not completely up to date, so some of the SDK/IDE interaction might have changed a bit. The programming parts should still be good.

2 Likes
#15

I remember people at TJC discussing it and said that on mobile and wifis not controlled by you its a bit of a security nightmare.
Still i think that an app like that made with a nice browser UI and designed with the joe average user in mind would be really cool.
Ie. You type something like username@sailfish.local in the browser, and be able from there to dnd files around, see your notifications, send and sms or even make a phonecall etc.

#16

https://de.lmgtfy.app/?q=why+is+lmgtfy+not+nice

I regard those posts that just answer another post with a link to lmgtfy as arrogant and patronising. Remember, once you were in the same situation when you didn’t know enough to formulate a decent question. Well probably not, you were already born as a genious.

1 Like
#17

Well, I’m currently working on a nextcloud tasks app, that’s coming along nicely. I’ve got a week off of work, and not going any place due to the pandemic, so that helps.

I’m also taking some time at the end of december off. My plans for apps I miss and want to write/improve, apart from the nextcloud tasks app:

  • look at the existing nextcloud notes app, create a PR to store credentials in sailfishsecrets instead of plain-text
  • nagios app
  • look at platform development to scratch some itches I have in daily use of sailfish os
  • maybe a mynoise.net app, although i’m not sure if there is an api and probably i’d need to discuss with the guy behind that site
  • volvo on call app
  • onkyo remote

Obviously, that’s going to be a bit much for december, and my current priority is the tasks app, but that should be done for an initial release this month.

8 Likes
#18

If it’s meant to be local LAN only then I’m out. It does not make any sense to me to start developing something I can’t use myself.

#19

It doesn’t need to be LAN only but i have no idea if you can make a connection with the phone and a PC through a browser without a service. Or at least without something you dont control yourself.

#20

I would be grateful if someone picked up the long abandoned FourSail app, a native Foursquare client for check-ins. I have tried to do that myself a while ago but never found the time required to learn about authentication/api keys/url redirections etc. The first thing required is the authentication mechanism which needs some sort of redirect via a website that the original developer maintained in order to get the app to authenticate as a valid client application that uses the FoursquareAPI. Hopefully after that step is sorted the application should work, although it uses a quite dated version of the API back from 2013

#21

What about Zoom? So much popular these days. They have API but I’m not sure if it possible to create fully working app with it.

#22

Oh, I forgot one:

  • native app for home assistant
#23

I would like someone to develope a Sailfish Mega client, or maybe tell me why it has not already been done.

4 Likes