SailfishOS roadmap update

Via de mailinglist [SailfishDevel] is weer een update gegeven over de ontwikkelingen rondom SailfishOS. De laatste tijd is er veel werk verricht voor de demonstratie van SailfishOS 2 op de tablet. Dit heeft vanzelfsprekend ook invloed op de ontwikkeling voor SailfishOS op de smartphone. De gehele update is als volgt:

During the last iteration, we had an intensive development period on tablet hardware adaptation and the new UI framework. The results were demonstrated at Mobile World Congress early this month. We are overwhelmed with the positive response and reviews of the Tablet. Do take a look at the blog entry summarizing our participation at MWC if you haven’t already: https://blog.jolla.com/mobile-world-congress-2015/

A quick recap on the progress so far:
New UI framework:
* Lockscreen with time, day and date information
* Media player controls in lock screen for native Media app
* Persistent status area in homescreen and lockscreen
* Richer eventsview with widgets such as
– displaying weather info
– upcoming calendar events
– shortcuts to toggle commonly used settings such as bluetooth, airplane mode, wlan and location,
– shortcuts to perform quick actions , e.g search on web, take a picture, make a note etc
– improved notification handling, grouping, secondary actions
* Power key menu
* Carousel transition to access home, open apps and events view
* New swipe animations and transitions
* Presence settings moved from events view to settings app

Landscape mode and layout updates for apps for tablet:
* Work in progress for Settings, Startup wizard, Calculator, Media player, Calendar and Gallery apps

Drop upower in favour of statefs:
Implementation work is now complete, now working towards gracefully handling the removal of obsolete packages. This task depends updating Mer Core OS to use newer version of libsolv, libzypp, zypper libraries.

GStreamer update to 1.x:
* More work on cleaning up the code for gst-droid encoders and decoders. The code is now more robust.
* Viewfinder and captured images should have the correct orientation.
* Hunting down issues with writing the correct orientation for the recorded videos.
* Porting the thumbnailer to a more recent libav
* Making sure qtmultimedia can be used with GStreamer 1.x by building it, rebasing nemo patches on top of it and fixing any issues.
* PHONE ONLY: jolla camera more or less works with some issues remaining. Gallery video playback with some issues remaining.

Toolchain upgrade to gcc4.8:
Moved to a later OS upgrade to give us time to complete the implementation of BTRFS balancing operation before performing OS upgrade.

For this iteration, we have planned the following:
* Kernel update to latest linux-stable version 3.4.106 for Jolla Phone
* Tablet adaptation work
– recovery mode/factory reset operation
– device identifiers supporting tablet OS upgrade
* Preparations for Bluetooth certification qualification
* Security fixes for  gnutls vulnerabilities (CVE-2015-0282, CVE-2015-0294), libgcrypt vulnerabilities CVE-2014-3591, CVE-2015-0837 and openssl vulnerability  notified in http://marc.info/?l=openssl-announce&m=142667932619582&w=2
* Implement parts of voicecall-manager for SIP and other VoIP protocols
* Finalize the new UI framework features demonstrated during MWC
* Tablet-optimized apps and landscape layouts
* Refresh visuals for Sailfish Silica components
* Virtual/HW keyboard opening policy
* Email Search
* Improve folders list in Mail app
* Continue with the following from last iteration
– Camera adaptation work on Tablet
– File system layout  implementation for Tablet
– Android runtime support Tablet
– Continue working on landscape modes for apps
– Settings pane to display disk usage
– Allow factory reset operation to reset the OS to the latest available public version instead of the age old factory image
– Upgrade to Pulseaudio 6.0
– Private browsing
– SIP integration into accounts. test IM capabilities in messaging

The following tasks unfortunately did not progress during the last iteration, we hope to catch up on them now.
– Review certification middleware code
– USB tethering UI
– Enable open VPN support on the OS

The next OS upgrade, version 1.1.4 (Aijänpäivänjärvi) is in the release candidate phase. Here are a few highlights on the release content:
– Landscape mode for Maps
– Split keyboard in landscape mode with a setting to disable it if needed under Settings > System > Text input
– IMAP idle/push support for mail accounts
– Resolution independent icons

In addition, Facebook account has been updated to use API version 2.2, which has unfortunately lead to extreme reduction in functionality, i.e no instant messaging nor contacts sync. Facebook has notified that the XMPP chat API will no longer be available after April 30, 2015 https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat.

We have now moved our codebase to use new API version, thus disabling Facebook instant messaging capability on SailfishOS. It also limits the contact synchronization to only provide contact info of people using the same app; in our case this would mean that one could obtain contacts only if his/her Facebook friends are also Jolla phone users. We agreed internally that such a limited contact sync is pretty much useless to our users and hence the contact sync has also be disabled. We have initiated talks with Facebook in an attempt to find a way forward.