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 ;) -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone Post to : ubuntu-phone@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
