What To Look Forward To In 2024?

[nshiell]

What exciting things are likely to happen for Jolla and SailfishOS in 2024?

Are there any opportunities for us to pay money to Jolla to speed up new feature development and bug fixes in SailfishOS?

[LSolrac]

• Pipewire replacing PulseAudio -or- PulseAudio update (sudden dying, sudden mic not working) -or- Restart Audio from Sailfish Utilities
• Verbose Backup/Restore (So it doesn’t feel like it’s getting stuck at any given time)
• AlienDalvik License for Ports
• VoLTE for Ports
• PWA Support

Not necessarilly Jolla, but adjecent:

• Browser Updates?
• The Return of Flatpak?

Edit: Altered Order

[PeegeeTips]

Qt6 and GCC update.

[attah]

Please don’t make this just another wishlist-thread… that’s not the question asked - and there is quite enough of those already.

[poetaster]

It’s mistaken to hope for such things, but I’m hoping for peace in Europe and peace in the Near East.

[ansch190]

After the moronic abandonment of Russian cooperation, the pace will probably return to what it was before.
The last blog entry is from February. That alone speaks volumes.

[poetaster]

It’s snowing for the first time in seemingly ever so I’m looking forward to sledding. Maybe a bit of skiing.

[poetaster]

@LSolrac

PWA Support

I’m not sure what you mean? That over specified ‘run this source in this webengine’ thing? I mean, half of my bloody apps are just a web engine wrapper around some html. And yes, I’m preferring to keep the html src on the device and avoid the web.

Do you mean like ‘shortcut’ to run a webpage in a container? The progressive part is a bit lost on me if you don’t port the dom stuff to QML.

[LSolrac]

That’s the problem. The solution right now is to make an app that’s just a web container. – Granted, having the technical know-how is nice, but having to make an app for every webapp isn’t as nice.

A shortcut could work, but I think having PWAs that allow for notifications, are theoretically standalone (having the browser UI invisible or similar), or are offline apps (true pwa), “installable” from the and/or a browser, is far more desireable than having a shortcut to open the browser (which disconnects every time you switch out of it) or having to make an app for it.

Closest thing we have is FratzenJail with custom URLs or lelig:web

[David]

“Together with the Jolla community, we are going to develop and take Sailfish OS into the AI ​​era. The new company has already agreed on more than EUR 10 million in funding for the implementation of the new strategy,” continues Saarnio.

I have concerns about this. Whilst AI is obviously going to transform everything IT, it’s difficult to predict how. The film Her required something close to AGI. The vast majority of the AI being plugged into everything at the moment is gimmicky.

I just read 31% of corporations are now using the likes of CodePilot. It’s possible now to train our own AI largely on Sailfish code eg OpenRepos though it does require a ChatGPT 4 subscription.

By the way, we are on the verge of ‘codeless programming’ ie drawing a UI, explaining how it’s supposed to work and the AI writing & packaging the whole thing for you. There is already a working demo of this creating simple programs using existing software.

[Steve_Everett]

All sounds very jolly (pun intended), but perhaps they should concentrate on fixing some of the longstanding basic functionality bugs in SFOS first?

[poetaster]

On platforms like ubuntu touch you have numerous 'PWA’s which are nothing more than a shortcut:

For instance,

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Ola
Comment= Ola cabs PWA
Type=Application
Icon=olacabs.svg
Exec=webapp-container --fullscreen --store-session-cookies --webappUrlPatterns=https?://book.olacabs.com/* https://book.olacabs.com
Terminal=false
X-Ubuntu-Touch=true
X-Ubuntu-Splash-Color=#7a8800

Which is nothing more than a standalone browser instance. I guess what you’re asking for is the webview version of sailfish-qml, so a runner?

That is obviously not an ‘install’ at all. Still, this is a PWA on ubuntu touch. There are a bunch of others, many of them are, unsurprising, a QML webview wrapper around locally installed assets. Look, for instance at, Philipp Fruck / DartsTrainer · GitLab (just an example). That’s more or less how I build webview based things. But my approach is simple in comparison since it doesn’t require extra metadata (the PWA manifest stuff). But, that is a case of a ‘real’ install where all html/js/etc assets are installed locally.

[poetaster]

@David

By the way, we are on the verge of ‘codeless programming’ ie drawing a UI, explaining how it’s supposed to work and the AI writing & packaging the whole thing for you.

I’m building a Model (VisionEncoderDecoder) for document analysis (ISO review processes). About 70% of the code is actually run of the mill algorithms. The ‘ai’, in this case, is mainly glue (classify, extract). I also run 35GB Codebooga (on cpu 128GB RAM). Now it’s not as good as ChatGPT4+. But almost. And ChatGPT4+ doesn’t save me much time. It’s useful for one liners. OpenAI still manages to assert that 2 is and is not prime within a context window of 2048 tokens.

The real trick, in the end, is producing good UI. That’s the most expensive part of building an app (or a game), in general.

[David]

You’re a coder and very familiar with the Sailfish specifics. I basically haven’t touched coding since my CS degree 28 years ago!

And we have so few coders that this sort of thing could make a huge difference. AI can also document and explain someone else’s code.
It could surely update API calls too. You reckon Codebooga would be up to this?

I suspect I’d be good at UI design but I’m guessing you’re talking about the coding side.

[ohnonot]

@David

“Together with the Jolla community, we are going to develop and take Sailfish OS into the AI ​​era. The new company has already agreed on more than EUR 10 million in funding for the implementation of the new strategy,” continues Saarnio.

It just says “the AI era”. A mere buzzword if you ask me. But it’s nice to hear that cooperation with EU and €10mil are on the table.

@David

By the way, we are on the verge of ‘codeless programming’ ie drawing a UI, explaining how it’s supposed to work and the AI writing & packaging the whole thing for you. There is already a working demo of this creating simple programs using existing software.

You mean like the WYSIWYG HTML editors of old? Those were a huge success!

[ansch190]

Jolla has a lot of old code that needs to be updated. AI/KI software can provide great services there if there is a lack of staff. At our company, we also have a lot of technical debt and are looking for solutions. Amazon also has a lot on offer. Porting from Java 8 to 17 etc… The question would be whether this would be possible with SaiflishOS. Effort and costs too, of course. OpenRewrite as an example.

[poetaster]

@David

And we have so few coders that this sort of thing could make a huge difference. AI can also document and explain someone else’s code.
It could surely update API calls too. You reckon Codebooga would be up to this?

There are a lot of misconceptions about what generative models can do. The first thing to note is that given a large enough context, ie. sufficiently detailed prompts to ‘guide’ the AI, the number of iterations it takes to get functional output (never mind up to some ‘specification’) is high. And you’re back to a human programming. Where these machines excel is regurgitating RECALL (with the flair of a dishwasher) from a large corpus of previously programmed stuff. They can’t dream up something new. I can get codbebooga to make, for instance, a supercollider Synthdef (a synthesizer voice) that whistles. Well, it produces a Synthdef (that even works!). But it does not whistle. In any case, codebooga (and chatgpt) is good for ‘template’ stuff. And well known algos. But neither have been able deal with things like ISO specifications meets real world (multiple sheets of xcell) and you would need multiple tuned models. I’m working on one, that with a great deal of care may deal with 20-30% of the final workload. Maybe I’ll get good enough at programming MLs to get to 50%.

[poetaster]

@David

I suspect I’d be good at UI design but I’m guessing you’re talking about the coding side.

I trained as a Printer. I learned typesetting writing SGML on typesetting machines in the 1980s. Spent 10 years doing traditional and then Desktop Publishing, and graphic design. During that period I also, initially as a hoby, made programs. Games. So, I’m talking about the entire process. I have completely failed to build nice UI both at the hardware and software level in recent years. I guess I’m a bit pessimistic because I’ve just left the finer point of UX as an afterthought although I know how good it can be. I think, for instance, that @BlacksheepGER does really clear UIs in the Silica context.

[David]

@ohnonot

It just says “the AI era”. A mere buzzword if you ask me. But it’s nice to hear that cooperation with EU and €10mil are on the table.

It’s EU money??

You mean like the WYSIWYG HTML editors of old? Those were a huge success!

Dreamweaver is still decent as long as you don’t need efficient code (maybe they can get AI to update it). But this is a step beyond. No more fields in tables for eg CSS. And obviously, no real limits in terms of what can be created in the future. There’s a video in the link from the /. page.

The only thing I’ve written with ChatGPT (3.5) is a browser extension. It took about 45 mins and I don’t know JS or Manifest files.