On day four of our Ubuntu Touch Hack Days we’re focussing on the RSS Reader and Stock Ticker apps. See also my previous posts about Ubuntu Touch Clock & Calculator, Weather & Calendar and File Manager & Music App Hack Days for more details.
We’ve seen some excellent contributions so far this week, not only to the apps we’ve put the spotlight on each day, but in other areas too. Yesterday the Clock app developers were busy fixing bugs and implementing features to sprint us towards 13.10 with plenty of contributions and testing, it was very much ‘all hands to the pumps’.
In addition we’ve seen a lot of testing of the new Click Packages and the associated back-end infrastructure. We’ve had App Showdown developers submitting their apps, getting reviewed and arriving directly on devices at lightning speed! It’s impressive to see the new infrastructure working end-to-end, especially with community developers discovering the kinks and those getting fixed too!
We also had new developers contributing for the first time. One who was new to Ubuntu Touch arrived in the #ubuntu-app-devel IRC channel after having some difficulty with the SDK under Linux Mint. It was gratifying to see suggestions from core apps developers, Canonical platform developers and others all helping to get this developer up and running. It all paid off in the end as their code contribution fixed a rather glaring error in the clock app (stopwatches shouldn’t go backwards after midnight) 
. I find it incredibly rewarding to see new people join our community and get up and running, and contributing so fast!
Thursday 5th September 2013 – RSS Reader & Stock Ticker
RSS Reader
RSS Reader (also known as ‘Shorts’) has evolved from it’s original style thanks to some greatdesign work from Lisette on the Canonical Design Team. We added the RSS Reader to the list of apps getting design input from Lisette part way through the cycle, and it’s really paid off. With regular hangouts involving the developers and design, we’ve been able to collaborate well on what will be the Ubuntu Touch primary news consumption app.
We have some work left to do though. The final grid implementation for ‘Shorts’ needs completing, and once done we need to get our QA ducks in a row by re-enabling our Autopilot tests which were disabled while there was a lot of code churn and design re-work, to allow the developers to focus. As with the other apps we have some bugs which need attention. If there’s time we’d love to get offline cached reading implemented, for those times when you’re reading the news underground!
Stock Ticker
Stock Ticker is another app which we adopted into the Core Apps project from a community developer who’d done a sterling job of implementing a really easy to use tool. It came to us pretty much complete, so the only outstanding feature we’d like to see implemented for the hack day is to add Unity actions API support, and as always, fix those outstanding bugs!
If you’d like to help then follow the links above, and drop by #ubuntu-app-devel on freenode IRC to introduce yourself!
The #ubuntu-app-devel IRC channel has been a lot busier in general this week than it usually is. There’s been a lot of productive discussion for developers entering the App Showdown, Core Apps developers and others. It’s turned into a very friendly and productive channel. Everyone is welcome!