Alfred spoke about some new apps, including Steps by Jevaz??? which uses the accelerometer to track how much walking you do. There is a baby monitor by Fabian (assisted by Mateo Salta). It is in early development. Fixel by Nicolas Colla brings back a very important tool for fixing pixels. He has also done some work on the Gimp markdown editor. It is great to see earlier apps which broke being rescued in this way. Aaron has introduced Waydroid Helper app. This enables you to hide Android applications and allows you to press a ‘stop Waydroid’ button. In the long term we hope that a lot of the features will become part of the OS but this is a very good way to start that process. Finally, there is PocketVM by Alfred himself. It is basically a Qemu front-end for UT. You can open a ISO image in at and set parameters such as RAM usage, hard drive size, CPU limitations etc. It offers a partial ability to share files. Eventually, the hope is for integration into ContentHub. In theory, it could be distro agnostic by running as a Snap package for example. Alfred showed Fedora running on his Volla phone.

Florian reported on OTA-21 which contains a lot of changes. It is hoped that we may get it out before Christmas. There are two quite big things in it. The greeter redesign has been put in, so there is something that users will immediately notice. This was done by Capsia. It is the thing which asks you for your PIN (or not, if you don’t have one). You will have had an early look if you are on rc channel. At the moment it doesn’t rotate into landscape but there is a fix in the works for that. In Settings there is a section for Storage but it isn’t great. Michele assigned some new colours to the interface and added some new categories, as well as fixing the totals. Microphone access in the browser has been broken for a while. The fix may allow Skype and other calls to work there now. Arun the lead developer for the Signal app Axolotl has said something may happen with the microphone…

Florian also spoke about Teleports and the issues we have had this week. First there was a refusal to let users login and then logged in users found that the app hung. One of the reasons is that Telegram are shifting from 32 bit identifiers to 64 bit identifiers. We knew this was coming but they went early on it and caught everyone by surprise. Aside from that, they have now introduced sponsored messages as a way of monetising the service and they will only allow clients which cooperate with that. The deadline they have given for that is 1 January 2022. A messy fix was rushed out at great speed for Teleports and everyone should update to it. The app now works again but some bugs have been introduced. Those will be sorted out but the urgent thing was to get messaging back. Of course ads will be annoying and we would rather not have them but we rely a lot on Telegram and it is fair enough that they should have some income. It is unfortunate that they managed the change so badly. Animated emojis will return but Telegram changed the format for those, so we have to reimplement…

On a different subject, Michele has been working on a notch workaround for UT. Florian showed an animation with sliders moving and resizing indicators to accommodate a notch of any size.