ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Robert Bruce Park <robert.park@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 05:11:35PM -0700, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> Improve it? I think the reason Gwibber has not been more widely adopted is that
> its not on par with other apps out there... This is not anyone's fault in fact
> Ken has done a lot of great work but my understanding was his role was just to
> maintain it not ever add features.

Well, you obviously haven't been paying attention. I was hired
specifically to work just on Gwibber, and I've been working on it
full-time for nearly 8 months now.

The improvements that I've implemented have been so thorough and
far-reaching that very little of the original code remains. So little,
in fact, that we stopped calling it Gwibber.

Today, Gwibber is a very lightweight Qml app that wraps around our new
social media aggregator that we are calling Friends. Friends itself
has no UI, it simply does the heavy lifting of sending, receiving, and
aggregating tweets/facebook posts/flickr images/etc.

Friends has more features, written in half as many lines of code, and
near-total test coverage (gwibber didn't even have a testsuite). Qml
Gwibber is very stylish and looks very attractive on the phone, and on
the desktop as well.

> > Yeah, pretty much. But now that Twitter Core App is cancelled, we will
>
> Why was it cancelled? (Some had tried to assure that a deal was previously
> reached). I thought Ubuntu Phone had to have major apps like this to
> succeed?

I hadn't heard anything about a deal being reached. All I had heard
about was negotiations. And the result of those negotiations is that
Twitter won't allow us to use their trademarks on a native app.

In my earlier emails, I expressed concern that not having the apps
would cause the Ubuntu platform to fail. That's still true, but the
Twitter app that we are going to have is going to be a browser
pointed at m.twitter.com. So when users look for "the Twitter app",
they'll find it, and it won't be a big deal. My concern was that there
would be nothing for them to find, but that is not the case.