ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

["Neil McPhail" <neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, February 1, 2016 3:33 pm, Neil McPhail wrote:
> Hello list
>
> I love my Ubuntu phone, but there are still some glaring deficiencies in
> the APIs, frameworks and lifecycle management which cause frustrations for
> users and developers. I thought it would be fun to set a challenge to the
> devs: can the infrastucture be improved so the app described below beomes
> possible to implement...?
>
> ---
> The app is an ebook reader, and should be capable of displaying books in a
> variety of formats (epub, txt, mobi etc). It should also have a
> text-to-speech engine, and the displayed text should follow the
> text-to-speech engine in real time. These things are relatively trivial to
> implement. However, some things are not so easy to achieve on Ubuntu:
>
> 1) It should be possible to add books from internet sites such as Project
> gutenberg
> 2) It should be possible to add books via USB cable from computer
> 3) It should be possible to add books via Bluetooth from another device
> 4) It should be possible to add books over WiFi from computer
> 5) It should be possible to store or add books from an SD card
> 6) Text-to-speech should continue when screen is off and...
> 7) ...displayed text should be updated to match the location of
> text-to-speech when the screen comes back on
> 8) The reading position should not be lost if the app is closed when
> text-to-speech is running
> 9) It should be possible to sync the library, reading positions etc to a
> central source
> 10) It should be possible to cut and paste from books in the app
>
> Taking these in turn:
> 1) Good progress has been made in allowing the web browser to download
> arbitrary filetypes. As app developers, we need simple and understandable
> documentation on how we can use content-hub (or whatever) to expose these
> files to our apps. I don't think the documentation on Content Hub is clear
> or comprehensive enough, and I see that view echoed on the IRC channels.
> it isn't clear whether content hub is _capable_ of dealing with these
> filetypes.
>
> 2) (i) Transfers over MHL are restricted to folders such as "Documents". A
> confined app cannot see these directories. It is not possible to add a
> file to the confined app's data directory over MHL, nor is it trivial to
> move a file from Documents to the app data dir using File Manager (see bug
> #1521292).
> (ii) MHL appears to baulk at some file types. I will need to experiment to
> see if it is even _possible_ to transfer .epub files etc.
>
> 3) Bluetooth does not seem to work for file transfer yet, if it works at
> all
>
> 4) Something like Aquarius's WiFi Transfer app could help here, but has
> the same caveats as (2), where one unconfined app cannot directly put data
> somewhere useful to another unconfined app, and documentation of Content
> Hub is missing as per (1)
>
> 5) There is no mechanism for an unconfined app to read or write to the SD
> card
>
> 6) There is no mechanism for audio to be prepared and sent to the speaker
> "on-the-fly" when screen is off. At present, a large buffer of audio would
> need to be prepared and sent to media-hub by the TTS engine. When that
> buffer was exhausted, audio would stop
>
> 7) If that buffer had been sent to media-hub, followed by the screen
> turning off, when the screen turns back on there would be no way for the
> app to know the reading location and update the displayed text accordingly
>
> 8) ditto
>
> 9) File sync is missing
>
> 10) Is this working for html apps now?
>
> ---
>
> I would be interested to hear thoughts and strategies on how to take this
> forward and make Ubuntu better.
>
> Cheers
>
> NMP
>


Of course, I'm confusing MTP and MHL. Whoops ;)