Ubuntu for Phones | Core Apps Project
I contributed to the development of the official Ubuntu Touch applications, including the Document Reader and File Manager.
QtQuick 2 The project
Ubuntu for Phones (more commonly known as Ubuntu Touch) is an Ubuntu-based mobile operating system originally developed by Canonical, the Ubuntu support company. The operating system was first launched in 2013 with the aim of providing an open-source ecosystem on mobile devices.
Ubuntu Touch features the convergence between desktop and mobile platforms. The goal of the project is to offer a common platform for different classes of devices - while also allowing a smartphone to be transformed into a complete desktop system when connected to an external monitor and keyboard.
However, in 2017 Canonical announced it would no longer support Ubuntu Touch development, thus leaving the community without an open source mobile operating system.
A group of passionate developers then decided to take matters into their own hands and created UBports, a community of developers dedicated to developing and maintaining Ubuntu Touch.
UBports has released several versions of Ubuntu Touch with constant updates and improvements, thus allowing the community to continue using and developing the open source mobile operating system. The community has also ported Ubuntu Touch to several third-party mobile devices that were previously unsupported.
Document Viewer
The Document Viewer for Ubuntu Touch is an application that allows you to view and read documents in different formats, such as PDF, ODF and MS-Office, and text files. The application was designed to provide a clear and legible view of documents while maintaining a simple user interface.
As a backend, it uses Poppler to render PDF files and LibreOffice(Kit) for text documents, spreadsheets and ODP / Powerpoint presentations.
I held the role of Lead developer for the entire duration of the project, from 2014 to 2017.
Following the release of support for Microsoft Office documents, an initiative was initiated to redesign the built-in PDF reader.
The goals of this redesign were:
Improve the interface for tablet and desktop devices
Add hyperlink support
Improve zoom performance, and thereby achieve feature parity with GNOME Documents
Allow configuration of rendering parameters to improve performance on low power devices.
However, following Canonical’s announcement that it was no longer supporting Ubuntu for Phones development, no further development took place, until in 2020, the community finally incorporated the code into version 3.0 of the application.
