Core Apps Update: Weather

This is the fourth in a series of posts highlighting the work being done on the Ubuntu Touch Core Apps.  I’ve been slacking a bit lately, and haven’t been publishing these as often as I had originally planned.  But now it’s time to get back on track, and what better way than with the visually appealing Weather App!

When you’re done with this one, be sure to go back and read about the Clock, Calendar and Calculator apps.

Weather Features

The weather app shows you the current weather conditions and temperate right away, followed by a forecast of the following week.  It also lets you add more than one location, so you can keep track of the weather where you are now, where you’re going next week, or where your family and friends are.

Settings

 Newly added to the Weather app is the a settings dialog.  For now, it lets you switch temperature units, which is nice for those of us living in handful of countries that still haven’t converted to the metric system.

Visual Designs

The Weather app is one of the 4 Core Apps that will be getting the Suru visual design, a unique look for Ubuntu Touch’s “ritual” apps.  We have already been given the new look for Clock and Calculator, and we hope to receive the designs and assets for Weather in the next few weeks.

Release Schedule

The Weather app was far enough along in terms of functionality that retro-actively labeled our month-1 milestone (May) as the alpha release.  Now the developers are working on the addition of settings and location management, along with a long list of Autopilot tests, and are on pace to deliver a beta release in July (month-3) and a final release in August (month-4).

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Core Apps Update: Calculator

This is my third Core Apps update, you can go back and read about the Clock and Calendar apps if you missed them.  Today I’m going to show off the Calculator app.

Calculator Features

Basic Functions

The Calculator does exactly what you would expect a calculator to do.  It’s a four-function calculator and does it’s job perfectly well.  But it has a few unique features that make it so much more useful.  Using the old paper-roll calculators as inspiration, the calculator lets you label the numbers in your calculation, so you can go back and see “7 what?”.  When you’re done with a calculation, instead of clearing it off, you simply drag upwards to “tear off” that individual calculation.

Calculation History

Just because you’ve torn off a calculation, doesn’t mean you’ve thrown it away.  Instead, your calculation is stored in a browseable history.  This makes the labels even more useful, because you can go back hours, days, even months to an old bit of calculating.  You can even tap on any number in any of those calculations to insert it into your current one.  If you really are done with a calculation, you can swipe it to the right or left to delete it from your history.

Visual Designs

The Design team says we’ll have visual designs for the Calculator later this week, so the developers will be able to start on implementing those.  Keep an eye on the design team blog and Google+ to see them when they come out.

Release Schedule

The release schedule for the Calculator is the same as the Clock.  It’s already well past what would be considered an Alpha release, so we just called May for that milestone.  Going forward, we plan on delivering a Beta in July that includes the visual designs, followed by a final release in August.

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Core Apps Update: Calendar

Yesterday I posted the first in a new series of Core App Update, featuring the Clock App’s development.  Today I’m going to cover the status of the Calendar

Calendar Features

Calendar View

The calendar now provides several different views you can choose from.  You start off with a full month at the top, and your events for the day below.  Swiping left and right on the month will take you back or forward a month at a time.  Swiping left or right on the bottom half will take you back and forward a day at a time.

Pull the event area down and let it go, and the month will collapse down into a single week. Now swiping left and right there will move you back and forward a week at a time.  Pull down and let it go again and it will snap back to showing the full month.

Finally, you have an option in the toolbar (swipe up from the bottom edge) to switch from an event list to a timeline view of your events.

Adding Events

You can current add events to the calendar app, and they will be stored in a local database.  However, after discussions with Ubuntu Touch developers, the Calendar team is refactoring the app to use the Qt Organizer APIs instead.  This will allow it to automatically support saving to Evolution Data Server as a backend as soon as it’s integrated, making calendar events available to other parts of Ubuntu such as the datetime indicator.  Being able to import your ical feeds is also on the developer’s TODO list.

Visual Designs

We don’t have new visual designs for the Calendar yet, but it is one of the apps that the Design team has committed to providing one for.  Now that they are done with the Clock’s visual designs, I hope to see these soon for the Calendar.

Release Schedule

Once again I worked with the Calendar developers to set release targets for their app.  The alpha release is targeted for month-2, this month, and should include the switch to Qt Organizer.  Then we plan on having a Beta release in August and a Final in September.

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Core Apps Update: Clock

The Ubuntu Touch Core Apps project is a new kind of collaboration between Canonical and the wider Ubuntu community, with a goal of developing high-quality applications for Ubuntu Touch. A couple of months ago I set out the Core Apps roadmap to October, and it’s high time I got around to giving you an update on our progress.

I had originally planned on giving an update of each of the core apps in a single blog post, but I realized that was going to get very, very long.  And nobody has time to read a giant wall of text.  So instead I’ll be breaking them up, one post per apps, so you can spread your reading time over multiple days.

To kick this off, here are the latest developments going on in the Clock app:

Clock Features

Sunrise & Sunset

Recently added to the main Clock tab is a way to check the sunrise and sunset times for the day.  Simply tap on the clock face and it will switch to the sunrise/sunset view.  Tap it again to switch back.  Swipe up from the bottom to reveal the toolbar, where you can set your location (which is used to calculate your specific sunrise and sunset times).

Alarms

The Clock app developers are still waiting on a platform API to support registering alarms that will work even when the Clock app isn’t running.  But while they’re waiting on that, they’ve still be working hard on the interface for managing your alarms.  Their approach is both minimal and obvious, you drag the hour and minute hands around to the time you and and click Done in the center.  If you need more options, you can pick how often to repeat, what alarm tone to use, and whether or not to vibrate.

Now these won’t actually work until the platform API is in place, but you can already see how it will look to the user, and how simple it is to do.

Timer

Like the alarms, setting a timer is both minimal and obvious.  Unlike alarms, the timer is working today.  Drag the hand around to set how many seconds, tap the minutes part of the time and drag the hand to set the minutes.  Make more than one revolution around the dial and it will start adding hours as well.

Another nice feature is the ability to define custom timers that you can use again and again.  Swipe up from the bottom to reveal the toolbar again, select Add Preset, and set the duration using the same simple dragging motions on the dial.

Stopwatch

Finally we come to the stopwatch part of the app.  In addition to simple start, pause and reset functionality, the stopwatch lets you mark laps as it goes, and keeps a log of each one that you can view both while the stopwatch is running and after.

Visual Designs

Some of you may have seen the new visual concepts that the Design Team published last month, which received quite a bit of positive feedback.  Well this week they sent the Clock developers the completed visual designs for the Clock app, so we should start to get our first taste of those designs in action in the next few weeks.

Release Schedule

Starting a couple of weeks ago, I started working with each of the Core Apps developer teams to set release targets for Alpha, Beta and Final releases of the app, with a goal to have them all at a 1.0 version before the October release of Ubuntu 13.10.  For the clock, we decided to mark the month-1 milestone (May) as an alpha release, because of the progress they had already made.  We then picked month-3 (July) for beta and month-4 (August) for our final release target.  Furthermore we have work items assigned on a monthly release basis to track the progress we are making.

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Building an Ubuntu SDK App: rev 8

Back again for one more article on developing an Ubuntu SDK app.  This one might be short,  but it covers one of the cooler bits of magic that QML gives you: Transitions.  But first, be sure to read the previous articles in this series!

Transitions

It used to be that if you wanted to animate parts of your app, you had to setup timers, calculate distances and speeds, program each step along the way, and do it all without killing the user’s CPU.  Sure it could be done, it was done, but it wasn’t easy.  QML is different, QML Transitions aren’t something you have to bolt on yourself, they’re built in at the foundation.

A Transition is defined as a collection of Animation components that can change different properties in different ways, triggered automatically by a change in a component’s state or other properties.  All you, the developer, needs to do is tell QML what you want to change, and how.

ListView Event Transitions

QML offers a variety of ways to define transitions, depending on what you need.  All Items have a transitions  property, which takes a list of Transition instances that will be called whenever the Item’s state property is changed.  You can also define a Transition for any property change using the “Behavior on <property> {}” syntax, which creates a Transition for changes on the named property.

But for me, it was a third item that fit best.  QML’s ListView component has several properties that take a Transition instance, properties such as add and remove, which correspond to an item being added or removed from the ListView.  These transitions are then applied to the delegate ListItem component when it is being added or removed.  I used these properties to make the items slide in and out of view when changing subreddit, or moving from one page to another.

    ListView {
        id: articleList
        ...
        add: Transition {
            id: addAnimation
            property bool forward: true
            SequentialAnimation {
                NumberAnimation { properties: "x"; from: addAnimation.forward ? articleList.width : -articleList.width; to: 0; duration: 300 }
            }

        }
        remove: Transition {
            id: removeAnimation
            property bool forward: true
            SequentialAnimation {
                NumberAnimation { properties: "x"; from: 0; to: removeAnimation.forward ? -articleList.width : articleList.width; duration: 300 }
            }
        }
    }

At first I just had transitions going in one direction, but I wanted to give some implicit meaning to them, going one direction for “more results” and another for “new results” (reload, change subreddit, etc).  That’s why I added the extra forward property, which is used to determine the direction of the transition.

You can see it in action in this video:

Next Time: Who knows?

This is the last revision currently in my bzr branch.  I have some other code in the works, for Sharing using the new Friends service, and HUD integration.  But for one reason or another, neither is working quite the way I want it yet, and they haven’t been committed to my branch yet.  There were typically several days between revisions when I was developing uReadIt, and I’ve been blogging about it nearly every day since my first post.  Once I have some time to hack on uReadIt some more, I will have more to write about, so stay tuned!

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Announcing the Ubuntu SDK Apps Collection

I’ve blogged three times now, here, here and here, highlighting some of the apps being written with the Ubuntu SDK.  Well after covering 44 of them, and more already popping up since yesterday’s article, we’ve decided that we need to start getting these into the Ubuntu Touch Preview images so that people can try them out on supported devices, give the developers real-use feedback and bug reports, and generally promote the amazing work being done by our community of app developers.

The Collection

So Alan Pope (popey) and I have kicked off what we’re calling the App Collection, which are apps being developed outside of the scope of our Core Apps project, but that we still want to support, promote, and  guide through the process of getting them ready for deployment to Ubuntu devices.  This means we’re going to commit to helping developers get their apps packaged, and we’re going to be uploading them to a new PPA specifically for these apps.

The Apps

We’re starting out by collecting a list of known apps, with information about where to find their source code, the status of packaging for the app, and finally whether they are available in the PPA or not.  I seeded the list with the apps I’ve been blogging about, but it’s open to anybody who has an app, or knows about an app, to add it to this list.

Apps should be in a usable state before adding them to the list, and should perform a function that might be of interest to a user or tester.  Hello World apps are great for learning, but it’s not really something that you want to promote to users.

Packaging

You don’t have to know about Debian packaging to get your app in our PPA, we’re going to help you bootstrap and debug your package.  Our goal is to provide the minimal amount of packaging necessary for your app to be installable, on the desktop or on devices, and work properly.  Of course, if you can provide packaging for your app, that will greatly speed up the process of getting it into the PPA.

We would also welcome any help from packagers. Even if you don’t have an app of your own, you can help support the app developer community by spending some time getting their packaging in order.  QML apps are relatively simple when it comes to packaging, so a seasoned packaging veteran could probably knock one out in a matter of minutes.

PPA Review

You won’t have to conform to all of the requirements that you will to get into the Ubuntu archives, and there won’t be a lengthy review process.  The Apps Collection is offered up for users to evaluate and test Ubuntu Touch and apps written for it, there is no guarantee of stability or security.  Generally if it installs and runs, we’ll include it in the PPA.  But we’re not crazy, and we won’t be uploading apps that are obviously malware or detrimental to the user or platform.

Preview Image Review

Your app will need to go through a more intense review before being approved to go into the default install of the Ubuntu Touch Preview.  You code will be inspected by the engineers responsible for the preview images, to make sure it won’t cause any problems with stability or security that would interfere with the primary goal of the preview images, which is showing off the incredible user experience that Ubuntu provides on touch devices.

Inclusion

Once it’s ready, your app will join the default apps being developed by Canonical, as well as Core Apps being developed by other members of the community in collaboration with Canonical project managers, as part of the demonstration platform for Ubuntu Touch.

This is a great opportunity for you, as a developer, to get your app in the hands of a large number of early adopters.  It’s also a great opportunity for us, being able to promote off our platform and how it is being used by the app developer community.

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Another Ubuntu SDK Apps roundup

The excitement around the Ubuntu SDK and application development is still going strong, both on the Ubuntu Touch Core Apps side and with independent developers. So strong, in fact, that it’s time for another round of updates and spotlights on the work being done.

Core Apps in the Touch Preview

Some big news on the Core Apps side is that they are now being reviewed for inclusion in the daily Ubuntu Touch Preview images being developed by Canonical for the Nexus family of devices, and by community porters to a growing number of others.

Now that all of the Core Apps are being regularly built and packaged in the Core Apps PPA, they can be easily installed on desktops or devices.  And, after being reviewed by the team building the Ubuntu Touch Preview images, three of them have been selected to be part of the default installed application set. So please join me in congratulating the developers who work to them.

For the Calendar, Frank MertensKunal Parmar and Mario Boikov have done a fantastic job implementing the unique design interactions that were defined by Canonical’s design team.  For the Calculator, Dalius DobravolskasRiccardo Ferrazzo and Riccardo Padovani were able to quickly build something that is not only functional, but offers unique features that set it apart from other standard calculators.  Finally, the Clock app, where Juha Ristolainen, Nick Leppänen LarssonNekhelesh Ramananthan and Alessandro Pozzi have put together a visually stunning, multi-faceted application that I just can’t get enough of.

New Independent App Development

In addition to the work happening on the Core Apps, there has been a continuous development by independent app developers on their own projects.

LoadShedding

Load shedding (or rolling blackouts) are a way for electricity utilities to avoid being overloaded by energy demands at peak times.  This an be an inconvenience, to say the least, especially if you don’t know it’s coming.  Maybe that’s why developer razor created this LoadShedding schedule app.

Multi-Convert

Multi-Convert was originally an Android application, written in HTML5, that is now being ported to Ubuntu.  Multi-Convert allows real-time conversion of weight, length, area, volume and temperature between different standard units.

 TV Remotes

I ran across not one, but two different apps for the remote control of home-theater-PCs, bringing the promise of your mobile phone as a “second screen” to Ubuntu Touch.

First is Joseph Mills (who also created a Weather app featured in the first of these roundups), with a remote control for MythTV:

And if you’re an XBMC user instead, not to worry, because Michael Zanetti has you covered with his remote control for XBMC:

CatchPodder

If you use your mobile device for listening to podcasts, you’ll be pleased to find the nice and functional podcast manager CatchPodder, which lets you subscribe to multiple feeds as well as playing files directly from the server.

AudioBook Reader

Keeping with the theme of listening to people talk on your Ubuntu device, we have an AudioBook manager and player that is being written with the Ubuntu SDK, which lets you load books, display cover images, and more.

Bits

If you’re a software developer, sysadmin or network engineer, there’s a good chance you’ve had to convert numbers between decimal, hexadecimal and binary.  This makes Bits a very handy utility app to keep in your pocket.

Periodic Table

From the same developer who created a Software Center front-end and Pivotal Tracker (both featured in previous posts) has a new project underway, an element browser that gives you loads of detailed information about everything on the periodic table.

WebMap

Canonical engineering Manager Pat McGowan has gotten into the fun too, building an app for displaying web-based maps from a number of providers.

GetMeWheels

For Car2Go customers looking to rent or return a vehicle, GetMeWheels lets you easily find the nearest locations to you.  Created by the same developer as the XBMC remote, this app was originally developed for Maemo/Meego, but is now being ported to the Ubuntu SDK.

PlayMee

A third app from the developer of GetMeWheels and XBMC Remote is PlayMee, a local music player that again was originally developed for Maemo/Meego, and is being ported to the Ubuntu SDK.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Tic-Tac-Toe is not a fancy game, but this one developed by Hairo Carela makes beautiful use of animation and colors, and even keeps a nice score history.

LightOff

If games are you thing, you should also check out LightOff, a simple yet challenging game where the object is to turn off all of the lights, but clicking one toggles the state of every square around it.

 

That’s all for now, keep those apps coming and be sure to post them in the Ubuntu App Developers community on Google+

 

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Building an Ubuntu SDK App: rev 7

Hurray, it’s Friday!  I’ve got a somewhat lighter article to celebrate the end of the work week (sorry to those of you for whom it isn’t).  Today I’m going to cover revision 7, in which I replaced the large default Headers with small, customized headers specifically for my app.  If you haven’t read my previous articles in this series, I strongly encourage you to do so, as each one builds on top of the one before it.

New Header Component

To replace the old Header, I first had to create the new ones.  Headers are relatively simple things, they sit on top and display text, so there wasn’t a whole lot to it.  I created an Item to act as the container.  Items are the most based UI elements in QML, all they really do is hold other elements, and provide the base type for other elements to inherit from.  Inside of the Item I put a Rectangle, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.  What a Rectangle can do that an Item can’t is set a border and background color, which is what I wanted to do with my header.  Finally I put a Label inside of the Rectangle to contain the header.

Item {
    id: header
    anchors.right: parent.right
    anchors.left: parent.left
    anchors.top:parent.top

    height: headerText.height + units.gu(1)
    Rectangle{
        anchors.fill: parent
        color: 'lightblue'
        border.width: 1
        border.color: 'grey'
        Label {
            id: headerText
            anchors.centerIn: parent
            text: ''
            fontSize: 'large'
            font.bold: true
        }
    }
}

You can see that I set the anchors for the Item to place it at the top of it’s parent (SubredditListView in this case) which is important for reasons you’ll see below.  I also set the Rectangle’s background color to ‘lightblue’. For the subreddit page I made the fontSize large, bold, and centered in the header (that’s what anchors.centerIn: parent does).  That works for the short text name of a Subreddit, but for the article I needed something a little bit different.

Item {
    id: header
    anchors.right: parent.right
    anchors.left: parent.left
    anchors.top:parent.top
    visible: false
    height: headerText.contentHeight + units.gu(1)
    Rectangle{
        anchors.fill: parent
        color: 'lightblue'
        border.width: 1
        border.color: 'grey'
        Label {
            id: headerText
            anchors.fill: parent
            anchors.verticalCenter: parent.verticalCenter
            anchors.margins: units.gu(0.5)
            font.bold: false
            wrapMode: Text.WrapAtWordBoundaryOrAnywhere
        }
    }
}

Here I made left the Label text it’s default size, and not bold.  I also didn’t center it horizontally like I did for the subreddit page.  But most importantly, I set the text to wrap so that articles with an overly long title will flow over multiple lines, increasing the size of the header to accommodate it.

Keeping it up to date

Since I was already passing the full article data data to the ArticleView component, extracting the new title and updating it was easy to do, I just needed to add a line to the onArticleChanged callback.

    onArticleChanged: {
        if (article) {
            articleWebView.url = article.data.url
            headerText.text = article.data.title
        }
    }

But changing the header on the SubredditListView required a little more work.  Since I already had a property on it called subreddit, I was able to write an onSubredditChanged callback to run whenever I needed to update the Subreddit name in this header.

    onSubredditChanged: updateHeader()
    Component.onCompleted: updateHeader()
    function updateHeader() {
        if (subreddit == '') {
            headerText.text = 'Frontpage'
        } else {
            headerText.text = subreddit
        }
    }

Next time: Transitions

One of the really neat things about QML is that it makes developing rich, fancy interfaces very easy.  And part of how it does this is by building support for transition animations right in at the ground level.  I knew from the beginning of this project that I wanted to try them out, and in the next revision I finally took the opportunity to add them.

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Building an Ubuntu SDK App: rev 5-6

Well I’m back again, with part 4 of this series.  No, that’s not a typo in the title, this post will be primarily about revision 5 and revision 6 of my bzr branch.  What happened to rev 4?  Well it was pretty boring to be honest, just removing some console.log() calls that I used as a poor excuse for a debugger.  Anyway, boring.

If you haven’t read the previous articles in this series, you’ll want to do that before reading any further here:

Comments

Everybody knows that comments are half the fun of Reddit, but up until now uReadIt wasn’t able to view them.  Now, the proper way to do this would be to use the Reddit API to download the comment threads, and load them using nested ListViews.  But that’s going to take a while, and I wanted comments now.  So I cheated, took the easy way out, and just used the existing WebView to load the Reddit comments page URL instead.  I’ll do it the right way in a later revision….probably.

The first thing I needed was a way to load comments instead of the article content.  This meant finally using the Comments toolbar action I put in place earlier.  But I needed a way to change back too, nobody likes a one-way trip, so I added an Article action as well.

    Action {
        id: commentAction
        objectName: "comment"
        visible: true

        iconSource: Qt.resolvedUrl("comments.png")
        text: i18n.tr("Comments")

        onTriggered: {
            articleContent.showComments()
            articleAction.enabled = true
            commentAction.enabled = false
            articleViewActions.active = false
        }
    }
    Action {
        id: articleAction
        objectName: "article"
        enabled: false

        iconSource: Qt.resolvedUrl("avatar.png")
        text: i18n.tr("Article")

        onTriggered: {
            articleContent.showArticle()
            commentAction.enabled = true
            articleAction.enabled = false
            articleViewActions.active = false
        }
    }

Then I had to write the showComments and showArticle functions, which would switch the WebView.url from one to the other.  There was just one problem, that code didn’t have the comments url, only the content url.  So first I had to pass more data to my articleView page.  To avoid having to do this again, I decided to just pass it the whole article data model that I was getting from JSONListModel, that way I would have all the data I could potentially need for future features.

Since I created a new property called article, I also get a callback handler called onArticleChanged, which I took advantage of to determine if an article’s content was already a link to a Reddit comment page, and if so disabling the option to switch between Article and Comments.

Page {
    id: articleView
    title: 'Article'
    property var article: undefined

    onArticleChanged: {
        if (article) {
            articleContent.article = article
            commentAction.enabled = !article.data.is_self
            articleAction.enabled = false
            articleView.title = article.data.title
            articleContent.visible = true
        }
    }

Now I could finally implement showComments and showArticle, which I decided to do inside of ArticleView.  To support that, I would also need to pass the article data model on again, this time to ArticleView.  Then I could use that data to switch the WebView’s url.

Item {
    property var article: undefined
    property string baseUrl: 'http://www.reddit.com'

    onArticleChanged: {
        if (article) {
            articleWebView.url = article.data.url
        }
    }
    ...
    function showComments() {
        console.log('Comments: '+baseUrl + article.data.permalink)
        articleWebView.url = baseUrl + article.data.permalink
    }
    function showArticle() {
        articleWebView.url = article.data.url
    }

Subreddit Filters

I usually only read the Hot subreddit filter, I’ve only used New a handful of times, but like I said in the first article in this series, I’m going things to learn the Ubuntu SDK, not make a Reddit app.  I wanted to write some code that used the Ubuntu Popups.Popover component, and changing Reddit filters seemed like a good use for that kind of component.

Like Popups.Dialog, using a Popover is relatively simple.  You start with a Component to contain your popup, add your components to it, then call PopupUtils.open.  For changing filters, I chose to just put in a Column filled with ListItem.Standard items, one for each filter.  When one of them is selected, it will change a new filter property on my SubredditListView (which will reload from Reddit using the new filter).

Component {
    id: popoverComponent
    Popups.Popover {
        id: popover
        Column {
            id: containerLayout
            ...
            ListItem.Standard {
                text: "Hot"
                selected: articleList.filter == 'hot'
                onClicked: {
                    articleList.filter = 'hot'
                    PopupUtils.close(popover)
                }
            }
            ListItem.Standard {
                text: "New"
                selected: articleList.filter == 'new'
                onClicked: {
                    articleList.filter = 'new'
                    PopupUtils.close(popover)
                }
            }
            ListItem.Standard {
                text: "Rising"
                selected: articleList.filter == 'rising'
                onClicked: {
                    articleList.filter = 'rising'
                    PopupUtils.close(popover)
                }
            }
            ListItem.Standard {
                text: "Controversial"
                selected: articleList.filter == 'controversial'
                onClicked: {
                    articleList.filter = 'controversial'
                    PopupUtils.close(popover)
                }
            }
            ListItem.Standard {
                text: "Top"
                selected: articleList.filter == 'top'
                onClicked: {
                    articleList.filter = 'top'
                    PopupUtils.close(popover)
                }
            }
        }
    }
}
tools: ToolbarActions {
    ...
    Action {
        id: filterAction
        objectName: "filterAction"

        iconSource: Qt.resolvedUrl("settings.png")
        text: i18n.tr("Filter")

        onTriggered: {
            PopupUtils.open(popoverComponent, filterAction.itemHint)
        }
    }
}

Packaging

Finally I was ready to package uReadIt, to make it easy to install.  I copied my packaging files from what was used by the Ubuntu Touch Core Apps, which was itself copied from packaging files used by the notepad-qml app.  Now I’ll admit, it’s not perfect, and we’ve already had patches submitted to fix the Core Apps packaging, changes which I will be applying to uReadIt at some point.  So don’t take these as the right way to package your app, I’m putting them here to explain in a broad sense what the different files do in a Debian package.

debian/control

The control file gives all of the data about your package.  It has two sections, the first is for the source package, it contains the source package name, list of dependent packages needed to build your app and package, and some other miscellaneous information used by the packaging system.  Below that will be one or more binary package definitions.  I only have one, you probably will too.  This section contains another list of dependent packages, but these are packages needed to run your app, not build it. It also contains a space to describe your application.  The first line of the Description should be a brief description, used when listing a lot of packages together, and the lines below it should have a longer description, used when showing more information about a single package.

Source: ureadit
Priority: extra
Maintainer: Michael Hall 
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 8.0.0), 
Standards-Version: 3.9.4
Section: misc
Homepage: https://launchpad.net/~mhall119/

Package: ureadit
Section: misc
Architecture: any
Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends},
         qmlscene,
         qtdeclarative5-ubuntu-ui-toolkit-plugin | qt-components-ubuntu,
         qtdeclarative5-qtquick2-plugin
Description: Reddit Browser
 Desktop application for browsing Reddit, it's articles and comments

debian/rules

The rules file is what actually does the building, it’s like a Makefile for your package.  Ideally this doesn’t do much more than calling dh (debhelper).  In fact, mine should be doing that, but it has a lot of unnecessary complication due to being copied from one project to another to another.  You’re probably better of just ignoring mine, just remember that debian/rules does the building.

#!/usr/bin/make -f
# -*- makefile -*-
# Sample debian/rules that uses debhelper.
# This file was originally written by Joey Hess and Craig Small.
# As a special exception, when this file is copied by dh-make into a
# dh-make output file, you may use that output file without restriction.
# This special exception was added by Craig Small in version 0.37 of dh-make.

# Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode.
#export DH_VERBOSE=1

# Work-around for some machines where INSTALL_ROOT is not set properly by
# dh_auto_install
override_dh_auto_install:
	dh_auto_install -- INSTALL_ROOT=$(CURDIR)/debian/tmp

# Workaround a bug in that debhelper package version
override_dh_install:
	mkdir -p $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/share/applications/
	mkdir -p $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/bin/
	mkdir -p $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/share/uReadIt/
	cp uReadIt.desktop $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/share/applications/
	cp uReadIt.bin $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/bin/uReadIt
	cp -r *.qml *.js *.png $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/share/uReadIt/
	
	dh_install --sourcedir=debian/tmp --fail-missing

%:
	dh $@

debian/changelog

The changelog file contains a record of revisions to your package, just like a bzr or git changelog.  More importantly, the changelog is what tells debhelper the lasted version of your package.  So the (0.3) in the top line on mine tells it to build ureadit_0.3_all.deb.  It will also use the signature line to try and find a matching GPG key when signing packages.

ureadit (0.3) raring; urgency=low

  * Initial release

 -- Michael Hall   Mon, 25 March 2013 23:09:00 -0400

debian/copyright

Making sure that FOSS packages can be distributed, modified, and redistributed is important, so in Debian and Ubuntu having a properly formed copyright file is a requirement.  I won’t go into much detail on how to do this, the link at the top will take you to the official spec.  The key pieces are the sections that give a file glob, license and attribution.  You can have as many of these sections as you need to properly cover all of your app.

Format: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5
Upstream-Name: uReadIt
Source:

Files: *
Copyright: 2013 Michael Hall
License: GPL-3.0

Files: debian/*
Copyright: 2013 Michael Hall
License: LGPL-3.0

Next time: Customizing headers

The stock Ubuntu component Headers are nice, but they weren’t serving my purposes.  I wanted them to display more text, and ideally take up less room.  So in the next revision, I replaced them with some custom components that did exactly what I wanted.

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Building an Ubuntu SDK App: rev 3

This is part 3 of an ongoing series, you should read rev 1 and rev 2 first.

In this revision I make several visual improvements to the existing components, try out some new gesture-based interactions, and undergo a significant refactoring effort to separate my code into smaller, cleaner files.

The Refactor

For the refactor, I wanted to split my app into logical components, based largely on the QML Components, but grouping the major and minor components that could be treated as a single entity.

I started by separating the components for each of my Pages, subreddits and articleView, into independent QML files that I could treat as single components when adding them to my Page.  For the SubredditListView, I further separated the model code (based on the JSONListModel) and delegate code (based on ListItem.Subtitled) into their own files.

These changes would allow me build domain-specific functionality on top of the base components in the Ubuntu SDK, while keeping my main code file uncluttered by all of that code.  My main file, uReadIt.qml, could then focus solely on layout and navigation.

Connecting the dots

I went out of my way to avoid inter-dependency between these components, so the ArticleListItem doesn’t need to know about the ArticleView.  But I wanted to change my ArticleView whenever an ArticleListItem was clicked.  This meant I had provide aliases, signals and callback handlers on my top-level components, and they connect them together in my main file.

I gave my SubredditListView an itemClicked signal, which would automatically provide an onItemClicked callback property that I could access from uReadIt.qml.  Then, in my delegate’s onClicked callback, I simply fired off the signal with a reference to the ListModel item.

Item {
    ...
    signal itemClicked(var model)
    ...
    ListView {
        id: articleList
        ...
        delegate: ArticleListItem {
            id: articleItemDelegate
            onClicked: {
                itemClicked(model)
            }
        }
        ...
    }
    ...
}

Then in my ArticleView code, I made a property alias called url that was linked to the url property on the inner WebView component.  Setting ArticleView.url would then behave exactly like setting WebView.url did.

Item {
    property alias url: articleWebView.url
    ...
    WebView {
        id: articleWebView
        url: ""
        ...
    }
    ...
}

Finally, in uReadIt.qml, I set the onItemClicked handler for my SubredditListView to change the url property on my ArticleView,

    PageStack {
        id: pageStack
        ...
        Page {
            id: subreddits
            ...
            SubredditListView {
                id: articleList
                ...
                onItemClicked: {
                    articleView.title = model.data.title
                    articleContent.url = model.data.url
                    articleContent.visible = true
                    pageStack.push(articleView)
                }
            }
            ...
        }
        Page {
            id: articleView
            title: 'Article'

            ArticleView {
                id: articleContent
                ...
            }
        }
        ...
    }
}

Visual tweaks

Alright, enough of the refactoring, I managed to do some more interesting and fun things in this revision as well.  For one thing, I improved the look of thumbnails on the ListView by giving different icons for in-Reddit articles, as well as NSFW and ‘default’ articles.  I also restricted their size to 5×5 grid units.

Grid Unit is a resolution-independent way of defining size of things in the Ubuntu SDK.  Instead of using pixels, which don’t work on both high and low density displays, or using physical units which don’t work on both hand-held and 10-foot displays, the Ubuntu SDK uses a Grid Unit.  The number of pixels in a grid unit depends on the device your app is running on.  On high-density displays, like the Retina displays on new Macs, your grid unit will use more pixels than on a standard resolution LCD, so that a Grid Unit is roughly the same physical size on both.  Likewise, on a television screen meant to be viewed from across the room, a grid unity will have a larger physical size than it would when running on a hand-held device, even if they are both 1080p screens.

ListItem.Subtitled {
    text: model.data.title
    subText: '('+model.data.domain+') - ' + model.data.score + ' - ' + model.data.subreddit + ' - ' + model.data.author
    icon: {
        var icon = model.data.thumbnail;
        if (icon == 'self') {
            icon = Qt.resolvedUrl("reddit.png");
        } else if (icon == 'default') {
            icon = Qt.resolvedUrl("avatar.png");
        } else if (icon == 'nsfw') {
            icon = Qt.resolvedUrl("settings.png");
        }

        return icon;
    }
    __iconHeight: units.gu(5)
    __iconWidth: units.gu(5)
    progression: true
}

In addition to these changes to the ListView, I was also getting tired of wondering if my content was being slow to load, or if it had failed for some reason, so I wanted to add a loading progress bar to my ArticleView.

To do this, I used the ProgressBar component from the Ubuntu SDK, and connected it to the loading property for the WebView component.  First I set the visibility of the progress bar to the loading status of the content with the onLoadingChanged callback.  If it was loading, the bar was visible, and when it wasn’t the bar was hidden.  Next I used the onLoadProgressChanged to set the progress bar’s value to the current loading progress of the content.  Once everything was connected, QML made it all just work.

    WebView {
        id: articleWebView
        ...
        onLoadingChanged: {
            loadProgressBar.visible = loading
        }

        onLoadProgressChanged: {
            loadProgressBar.value = loadProgress
        }
    }
    ProgressBar {
        id: loadProgressBar
        ...
        minimumValue: 0
        maximumValue: 100
    }

Dragging gestures

Finally I started to experiment with drag-gestures for moving from one page of results to the next, or reloading the subreddit entirely.  This was pretty tricky, the ListView component doesn’t provide any single property to tell you how far past the either end a user drag or flick has moved the content.  However, it does provide a contentY property that I could use to, eventually, calculate how far off the natural bounds the user has moved the content.

First I created a callback handler for onContentYChanged so that my app was aware of the content movement within the ListView.  Then, if Qt says the user was dragging the content (as opposed to movement caused by a flick), I would calculate the over-drag for both the top and bottom of the list.  I didn’t want to trigger an event for small drag distances, so below a certain threshold it will give instructions to continue dragging to perform an action, and beyond that threshold the text will change to tell the user to let go of the drag to initiate that action.

Next time: Packaging

By now I had an app that I wanted to use regularly on my Nexus 7.  Previously I had been running it from QtCreator by pressing Ctrl+F12 while I had my N7 connected via a USB cable, but that meant I could only start it when I was plugged into my laptop.  Not ideal for in-bed Reddit browsing.  So in the 4th revision of my code branch I added Debian packaging files for easy installation.

Read the next article

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