Well, so much for plans of a quick 1.0 release.
Those of you keeping your devices up to date have probably seen that Beru has been broken for the past month or so. I managed to trace it to a conflict between QtWebKit and Oxide, but I had no clue about how to fix it. Truth be told, I was getting pretty tired of playing whack-a-mole with the evolving SDK. Perhaps I’d just wait for an actual release, and then try to get Beru working again.
Then something amazing happened.
Out of the blue, Alan Pope invited me to attend a Canonical device sprint in Washington, D.C. I thought it’d be an interesting experience, so I signed up. I’ll tell y’all more about it in a future post, but for this post the important thing is that I was able to spend a whole week bugging Alan and David Planella with questions they couldn’t answer. They introduced me to the people who could answer these questions, including:
- Chris Coulson, who taught me how to use the
onDownloadRequestedsignal with Oxide. As a result, Beru now uses only Oxide and no longer hangs when starting. - Jamie Strandboge and Olli Ries, who helped me get started with the DownloadManager, and who helped figure out why it was putting files where I couldn’t read them.
- Manuel de la Peña, who troubleshot an odd bug about Project Gutenberg downloads.
- Ken Vandine, who explained that the Content Hub doesn’t yet solve all of my problems, but would in the future.
- Zsombor Egri, Zoltan Balogh, and Christian Dywan, who listened patiently to my many complaints about the SDK, and then delicately explained why I was wrong.
- David Planella, who showed me the correct path to install translations in click packages. (I lied when I said he couldn’t answer my questions.)
Thanks also to David Callé, Daniel Holbach, Alexandre Abreu, David Barth, James Tait, and the many others who fielded questions, helped out, and said nice things to me.
Additionally, Alan loaned me a Nexus 7 for the duration of the sprint, and for the first time I got to try Beru on an actual device. I finally understood the problem with swiping reported here, so now Beru has a much better swipe-to-turn behavior. The direction of the page turn is set by the direction of the swipe, not the half of the screen it begins on, so you can swipe either direction with your thumb in a corner of the screen. (You can still tap to turn, with direction determined by the half of the screen you touch.) I also tweaked the animation a bit, so that taps and quick swipes give instant page turns, while slower motions will still be animated.
All of these changes meant that I didn’t want to go to 1.0 right away, so 0.9.10 is available in the click store and 0.9.11 is on this page. But I think we’re finally in a good place to get a 1.0 release relatively soon.
Please note: Due to bugs 1384349 and 1384421, downloading e-books is currently broken. This should be fixed in coming images, with no change needed in Beru.