devices

Daniel McGuire is unstoppable. The work I mentioned yesterday was great, here’s some more, showing what would happen when the user selects “Playing Music”. More feedback we received so far: Kevin Feyder suggested using a different icon for the app. Michał Prędotka asked if we were planning to add more icons/pictures and the answer is “yes, we’d love to if it doesn’t clutter up the interface too much”. We are going to start a call for help with the content soon....

Some of you might have noticed the Help app in the store, which has been around for a couple of weeks now. We are trying to make it friendlier and easier to use. Maybe you can comment and share your ideas/thoughts. Apart from actual bugs and adding more and more useful content, we also wanted the app to look friendlier and be more intuitive and useful. The latest trunk lp:help-app can be seen as version 0....

15.04 is out! And another Ubuntu release went out the the door. I can’t believe that it’s the 22nd Ubuntu release already. There’s a lot to be excited about in 15.04. The first phone powered by Ubuntu went out to customers and new devices are in the pipeline. The underpinnings of the various variants of Ubuntu are slowly converging, new Ubuntu flavours saw the light of day (MATE and Desktop next), new features landed, new apps added, more automated tests were added, etc....

I already blogged about the help app I was working on a bit in the last time. I wanted to go into a bit more detail now that we reached a new milestone. What’s the idea behind it? In a conversation in the Community team we noticed that there’s a lot of knowledge we gathered in the course of having used Ubuntu on a phone for a long time and that it might make sense to share tips and tricks, FAQ, suggestions and lots more with new device users in a simple way....

Whether or not Ubuntu Edge will get the green light or not (read Joey’s great 5 Reasons Why You Should Stop What You’re Doing & Pledge to #UbuntuEdge), everybody’s hard at work making Ubuntu Touch, the beautiful mobile OS happen. Two weeks ago we had our first Ubuntu Touch Porting Clinic and it went quite well. We found and fixed a number of issues in our tools, our porting guide and many porters turned up to ask their questions and update the images....

In the last weeks I blogged a couple of times about how we want to get Ubuntu out to more and more users in a much much easier way. It would be great if we could have gotten all images built in the data centre, but unfortunately do redistributability issues (some firmwares, blobs and proprietary kernel modules) not allow us to redistribute them easily. Another issue were some short-comings in our infrastructure, which have to some degree been fixed already....

These are very exciting times for Ubuntu Touch. Not only is the Ubuntu Edge, an Ubuntu super-phone, being funded right now, but we are also making lots of progress on getting Ubuntu running perfectly on phones and tablets near you. I blogged about this a couple of times now, but Ubuntu Touch has been ported to LOTS of devices in the meantime. If we consult our Touch Devices list, there are 45 working ports, with 30 more in progress, and across 21 different brands....

The unstoppable Sergio Schvezov is working on bug 1201811 right now. Once it’s fixed this should put is into a position where users of devices for which we have Ubuntu Touch images (and not just the four devices we supported right from the start) can just use phablet-flash. This doesn’t mean that they are “officially supported” or that they’re built daily in the Canonical data centre, but that you can make use of the images much more easily....

Some weeks ago I wrote a blog post and shared a personal view on Ubuntu’s history as a project. In there I explained (among other things) my view that Ubuntu as a project has quite often taken hard decisions to bring something new and exciting to people. The goal always was the same: bring open source in a beautiful form to as many people as possible. If I look around me today, it’s just beautiful to see what we’ve achieved....