Planet Wolves

We are working on a powerful vision with Ubuntu; to build a convergent Operating System that runs on phones, tablets, desktops, and TVs. A core part of this vision is that this is a platform and ecosystem that you can influence, improve, and be a part of, significantly more-so than our competitors.

One consistent piece of feedback we have seen from carriers and handset manufacturers is a a greater desire for platform competition and participation on helping to shape and define the ecosystem. A key goal for Ubuntu is to satisfy these needs.

Today we launched the the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG) which includes Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Telecom Italia, Korea Telecom, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, and SK Telecom as founding members. Wide industry participation in the group will help us to prioritize the delivery of new Ubuntu features, and grow an ecosystem of software, services and devices that meets that need.

The CAG provides regular meetings that take place regularly and typically include a briefing by Canonical or a partner company, followed by feedback from carriers. Members can bring domain specialists to calls for each relevant topic covered. Topics planned for discussion in the CAG forum include:

• Differentiation for OEMs and operators.
• Developer ecosystems and application portability.
• HTML5 standards, performance and compatibility.
• Marketplaces for apps, content and services.
• Revenue share models for publishers, operators, and OEMs.
• Payment mechanisms and standards.
• Platform fragmentation.
• Consumer and enterprise market segments and positioning.

CAG members can also launch Ubuntu devices before non-members in local markets. The first two launch partners will be selected from within the group, with the next wave following six months later; non-members will face a substantial wait to gain access to the platform. Members will have early knowledge of silicon, as well as OEM and ODM partners involved in the Ubuntu mobile initiative.

The Carrier Advisory Group is chaired independently of Canonical by David Wood, who has 25 years’ experience in the mobile industry, including leadership roles at Psion, Symbian and Accenture. He has wide experience with collaborative advisory groups, and twice served on the board of directors of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).

David has this to say about the CAG:

“The mobile industry still needs an independent platform that enables innovation and differentiation. That platform is Ubuntu. The Carrier Advisory Group will have the opportunity to influence the Ubuntu roadmap, and take full advantage of the potential this emerging platform.”

If you are a carrier interested in helping shape Ubuntu’s mobile strategy and being part of the CAG, click here.

Last week I had a neat idea. Well, at least I think it is a neat idea. Let me share it with you folks to get your take.

We have been spending a lot of time refining every aspect of the application development process for writing Ubuntu phone/tablet/desktop applications. This has included:

• Building a simple, and powerful Ubuntu SDK.
• Building a comprehensive knowledge base on developer.ubuntu.com for getting started writing your first app, and performing common programming tasks.
• Integrating source control, bug tracking, and more from Launchpad into the SDK.
• Providing a safe and secure, sand-boxed environment to run apps in, and an automated process for reviewing how these apps come into Ubuntu and are exposed to Ubuntu users.

This is all part of an end-to-end process to make writing apps for Ubuntu fun, simple, and intuitive from the minute you load the SDK to the minute your app appears on a users phone, tablet, or desktop.

Project Websites

One piece we haven’t looked into is how app developers can set up a website for their app.

App websites vary tremendously in size and complexity. Some people just want a single static web page with details of the app and how to get it. Some want a more complex site with integrated forums, bug tracking, and more.

As part of what we can offer with Ubuntu, we should be able to bundle all aspects of your infrastructure too. Need a website? Check. Need a forum? Check. Need a bug tracker? Check.

Fortunately we have a powerful cloud orchestration tool in Juju that can not only simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of the service, but could potentially take virtually all of the pain out of getting the site set up in the first place, and then scale up where needed.

The Idea

Let’s assume I have just published my first version of my app in Ubuntu. I now need a simple website to get my app on the web and known to users. While I want to start simple, there is a possibility though that my project may become hugely popular making me a king among men and require a larger, more expansive web presence.

Let’s start simple though. Ideally, I want to be able to specify some configuration detail like this in a file:

app:
   app-name: Read All About It
   download-archive-name: readallaboutit
   launchpad-project: readallaboutit
website:
   website-strapline: All the headlines in your hand.
   screenshots: ['http://www.myscreenshotonline.com/screen1.jpg',
     'http://www.myscreenshotonline.com/screen1.jpg']
   page-about: True
   page-developers: True
   page-screenshots: True
   page-contact: False

…and then do this:

juju deploy --config myconfig.yaml ubuntu-app-website

The charm would read in the configuration file and generate a set of static web pages based on that configuration.

As an example, it would pre-populate chunks of the page, and generate developer information on the Developer page with details of the main branch, bug tracking, a form to submit a bug, and more (we can pull this from the Launchpad project).

It could look simple like this:

This would mean an app developer could spin-up a super light-weight app website with just a configuration file and Juju on whichever cloud service they prefer. This would be light-weight both in terms of getting up and running and resource usage; you could set this up on a tiny cloud instance. As ever, if my project was to get slashdotted I could scale up the service, as with any other Juju charm.

Now let’s assume I want to add more functionality to my website. This is where the real power of Juju could come in. Let’s assume I want a forum. I should be able to run:

juju deploy ubuntu-app-website-forum
juju relate ubuntu-app-website ubuntu-app-website-forum

This would then spin up a forum (or Discourse site) but the charm would integrate it into the existing website with a navigation link and shared theming. It could then look like this:

We could then conceivably have any number of supported additions (e.g. mailing lists, video streams, event organization, tutorial content, API docs etc) for the website that app maintainers can use to easily expand their service as they see fit.

Next Steps

I shared this idea with Jorge who thought it was a neat idea. He then talked with Marco who has been putting together a first cut that we can experiment with. If anyone is interested in helping to build this, please let me know in the comments.

Ever since we first announced Ubuntu for phones on January 2nd this year, a fantastic relationship with our friends in the XDA community has formed. For quite some time now we have been releasing daily images of Ubuntu for phones/tablets and our friends in the XDA community have been working to enable these images for a wide range of devices.

Much of this work has been happening on the Ubuntu Touch XDA forums which have seen 4600+ posts from this enthusiastic community.

I wanted to follow up on a few different XDA-related things that are going on.

Participating in and Sponsoring xda:devcon

From 8-11 August in Miami, Florida will be xda:devcon, the very first XDA developer conference. We are sponsoring the event and will be exhibiting there. We are delighted to be supporting such an awesome event.

I will also be speaking at the event and delivering a new presentation called Building a Convergent Future With Ubuntu that will cover the vision and goals of Ubuntu on devices, how our community is right at the core of what we are doing (and accessible to everyone), and how far along we are in this vision.

Michael Hall will be running an app development workshop and showing attendees how to build an application from scratch that runs across Ubuntu phones, tablets, and desktops. More details on Michael’s workshop will be announced soon. Given that we are releasing the beta of our Ubuntu SDK in July, this workshop will be a great opportunity to come and learn how to get started!

We will also be joining the main conference and happy to answer questions, demo Ubuntu on these different devices, and anything else. If you want to set up a meeting, please drop me an email.

Weekly XDA Q&A

We want to ensure our friends in the XDA community have as much information at their fingertips about Ubuntu Touch. As such, Daniel Holbach is collating questions from the community (you can ask your question here) and then posting a weekly summary of questions on this XDA forum thread.

As ever, if anyone has any other questions, be sure to join my weekly live Ubuntu Q&A videocast. This week it will be happening at 6pm UTC on Wednesday 19th June on Ubuntu On Air. Be sure to join me then!

Making Porting Easier

One of the reasons I am so delighted to see the close relationship between Ubuntu and XDA continuing to form is that I feel making Ubuntu available on a range of different devices is a key part of what will help us to be successful.

Although we at Canonical a are currently targetting a very specific set of handsets for our first release of Ubuntu Touch (Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4), the wider XDA community has been working to enable the image on other devices that Canonical is not directly focused on. This is an awesome contribution.

One of the technical challenges here is how we handle firmware and binary blobs to make various hardware components work. Unfortunately, some of this firmware cannot be legally re-distributed by us (although the user can typically download it directly).

I have asked Daniel Holbach to work with the phonedations team to ease this process as much as possible and some work is going into phablet-flash to make it easier to handle these firmware pieces. We should have more on this in the coming weeks.

Onwards and Upwards!

There is lots of fantastic work going on and I am looking forward to continuing to work with the always excellent and approachable XDA community. We look forward to seeing you in Miami in August!

The Ubuntu community is a core part of what makes us what we are, and right at the center of that are our Ubuntu Members. Ubuntu Members provide significant and sustained contributions over a wide range of areas such as packaging, documentation, programming, translations, advocacy, support, and more. We always want to do our best to recognize and appreciate our many members in the Ubuntu family, across these many different teams and our flavors.

We are pleased to announce a new benefit for new Ubuntu Members. When you become approved as an official Ubuntu Member, you will be mailed a printed certificate signed by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project to recognize your membership. We hope you put it up on your wall where you contribute to Ubuntu and bring freedom and openness to technology.

To find out more, and find out how to get yoru certificate, see this post on the fridge.

In recent months we have been seeing tremendous growth and interest in the Ubuntu SDK that is at the heart of building applications for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, desktops, and TVs. The SDK provides the ability to build rich native applications in QML/Qt that hook right into the system, platform services, messaging, social media and more. We will also be providing support for HTML5 apps soon (with deep platform integration), and for OpenGL apps too.

Today you can download the SDK and follow a getting started tutorial to write your app. If you have Ubuntu running on a phone/tablet (find out how to install the daily images here), you can test and run the application the device with just a click. The entire experience is all encased within our SDK IDE. We are still refining and improving many aspects of the SDK, and our Beta release will be in July.

When most developers are learning a new platform or technology, you have lots of questions. How do I do X? How do I do Y? While we can get our new developers up and running quickly with the SDK and tutorial, we also want to help provide as many answers to these common questions too. This is where the new cookbook comes in.

The App Developer Cookbook

Today we are introducing the Ubuntu App Developers Cookbook on developer.ubuntu.com. The cookbook provides a number of different pages (e.g Device Sensors, Files and Storage, Games, General App Development, Multimedia, Networking etc) with a list of common questions and their associated answers.

Instead of building an entirely new piece of infrastructure, we wanted to work with the place where our developers naturally ask their questions; AskUbuntu, the Ubuntu themed StackExchange site we use for all our Q+A needs across the Ubuntu community.

Here’s how it works: when you have a question, simply browse the cookbook to find an answer for your query. If you don’t, simply ask that question on AskUbuntu, and when a question has received two up-votes and an accepted answer, it will be added to the cookbook. This will ensure the very best content appears on the cookbook for current and new Ubuntu developers to enjoy.

What you see today is a first iteration of the cookbook. In the next few weeks we will be making some additional improvements:

• Refining the questions listed in the cookbook.
• Enhancing the navigation of the cookbook pages.
• Adding sub-sections to make content easier to navigate.
• Having a different cookbooks for Native (QML/Qt apps), HTML5, OpenGL, and Scopes.

If you have any questions or queries about the cookbook, feel free to share in the comments!

How To Help

One of the core foundational strengths of Ubuntu is our community, and we are looking for help in ensuring our cookbook is as capable and comprehensive as possible. As such, we would like to encourage our community to do the following:

• Be sure to ask questions on AskUbuntu for topics not covered by the cookbook.
• When you ask a question, be sure to accept the answer when it answers the question otherwise it won’t be accepted into the cookbook.
• Be sure to upvote questions that you find useful.

Thanks for continuing to help make the Ubuntu App Dev community a fun, dynamic, and innovative place to be!

Customer: "WHY DID YOU NOT RING US AT 8:00am?"
Me: "Because we do not start till 9:00am"
Customer: "WHY DID YOU NOT PHONE US AT 9:00am?"
Me: "Because the email with the answer only came in 5 minutes ago and it's now 9:25am?"

I just love that before I've even had a coffee.