ubuntu-touch-coreapps team mailing list archive

[Nekhelesh <krnekhelesh@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

During the sprint at Malta, I was given new designs for the Clock App to 
make it more aligned with other phone apps like Gallery, Dialer etc. The 
new designs can be seen at 
https://drive.google.com/#folders/0B55Gs35e-jxxNzRzOHVxbmNDbFU. Due to 
the vast amount of design changes and other factors, we (Myself and 
other core apps devs) came to the conclusion that starting fresh would 
be better rather than modifying the old clock app. Some of the main 
reasons behind this decision were,

1. Timer and Stopwatch are not present in the new clock app. The
   designers do have a plan to introduce Timer and Stopwatch later but
   this will most likely happen post RTM. If we were to modify the old
   clock app, that would mean removing more than 50% of the code out in
   the process.
2. The world clocks back end needs to be rewritten to use the new
   QTimezone class introduced since Qt 5.2.
3. The Clock UI has changed drastically requiring a complete rewrite of
   the UI code of the old clock.

While I do understand that this close to the RTM it is rather risky to 
be doing something as big as this. However I am personally confident 
that this can be done within the time frame since one of the core 
functionality *alarm *can essentially be copied over from the old clock 
app to the new one. I am also keeping a keen eye on the alarms 
functionality in the platform side of things. Hopefully next week we can 
expect to have platform deep sleep wakeup when an alarm is triggered.

The plan at the moment is to keep the old clock app on the phone until 
the new clock app becomes stable at which point we will swap them. We do 
intend on pushing the old clock app to the store when that happens so 
that users can still install the old clock app for the timer and 
stopwatch functionality.

I have already created a new branch at [1] that you guys can keep an eye 
on for the latest development. In addition we have a session at the 
upcoming Ubuntu Online Summit. You can find the session at [2]. We are 
also tracking feature implementation and their progress at the Trello 
Board you can find at [3].

If you were thinking of contributing to the core apps, now would be the 
ideal opportunity since the code base is small. Join us at the Ubuntu 
Online Summit session where you can voice your concerns and feedback :)

Enjoy your weekend!

[1] lp:~ubuntu-clock-dev/ubuntu-clock-app/utopic-3.0
[2] 
http://summit.ubuntu.com/uos-1406/meeting/22230/appdev-1406-clock-app-reboot/
[3] https://trello.com/b/Ie2rAS3W/core-apps-management

Cheers,

Nekhelesh
Clock App Dev