Nemomobile in May 2022
What is new in May? The rendering of the home screen, applications, and keyboard orientation were improved. The dbus permission was fixed. Now it is possible to answer the phone calls, but the audio still doesn’t work. Glacier-gallery and QtQuick Controls Nemo got some improvements. Gtk applications have a keyboard. Nemo will be at two conferences in June.
Window orientation
It might sound like a trivial task, but many places of code need to cooperate together. The sensors need to provide the right information. The glacier-testtool was improved in order to show human-readable string instead of magic numbers. It helps to understand if input data needs some transformation. So it could be verified after the change of the transform matrix (CutiePi).
Then UI must be fixed. There are multiple components: lipstick, glacier-home, maliit, and application. The glacier-applications are using qtquickcontrols-nemo.
Glacier-home and lipstick must render the home screen and AppSwitcher thumbnails properly. The glacier apps are detecting if the keyboard is visible and adjusts the size of the page accordingly. Additionally, also non-glacier applications must be rendered properly.
The last thing, glacier-settings now has an option to lock the screen in portrait, or landscape, or keep it dynamic.
Phone Calls
The phone call is probably the most important feature that everyone expects from a phone. We are moving slowly forward. There are a number of libraries involved. The glacier-dialer is going through voicecalld to ofono which should send the right command to modem and switch pulse audio profiles.
It seems we were stuck at SailfishOS permission model
which was checking if the current user is a member of the group privileged. Some tuning
in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ofono.conf might be still necessary. After that, it is possible
to answer or reject phone calls. The audio profiles are still not switched.
The dialer application had an issue with contact lookup so the contact avatar and name weren’t shown even when were known. Contact search was also fixed. The microphone and speaker controls were added. It didn’t help with audio profiles, unfortunately.
At the same time, there is an issue with turning off cellular data.
A new version of the libphonenumber package was added.
Gallery
The gallery application was reworked. It obtained a list view with thumbnails shown on the bottom of the window and an editor of images that currently allows rotating and flipping the image.
Improvements of backend
There was a new build of libicu package, which forced us to rebuild nemo-qml-plugin-contacts. The dependency was changed to the exact version we will see if this breaks updates in the future.
The most visible will be a change in the page header. There is a bouncing indicator that shows that the drawer contains some items. Also, Button and ListViewItemWithAction styles were updated a little bit.
For maliit on-screen keyboard, we have now maliit-input-context-gtk package which allows keyboard in Gtk apps. The Gtk4 support is unfortunately not implemented. For example, midori browser can be started. It does work, but showing the popup window separately in lipstick could be confusing.
Conferences
There will be at least two talks about NemoMobile in June. The DevConf Mini will be on 2nd June in Brno, Czech Republic. The NemoMobile talk will be at 4pm CEST. The conference language is English. It is expected that talks will be recorded and published after the conference.
The second talk will be at Installfest.cz conference which will be in Prague, Czech Republic on 11th June. The Nemomobile talk will be at 11am. It is also expected, that the conference will be streamed online, but both the conference and the talk language will be in Czech.
