I am pleased to announced that Logviewer is now published in the Ubuntu Touch store.  The app no longer runs unconfined but uses “read_path” pointing to “/var/log/” and “/home/phablet/.cache/”. If you think there is another interested log path let me know and I will try to include it.

Also, one feature that landed by popular request is submitting a selected section of a log to pastebin , thanks to Popey for the image:

I have been recently doing some android development for Techfunder, one thing that I have found really useful when testing my app is using CatLog. CatLog allows you to check the app and system logs on the go. This is extremely useful when you have a crash while you are not close to your laptop.

This motivated me to look into writing a similar app for Ubuntu Touch. So here it is: LogViewer!

This app, like CatLog, is for developers and requires unconstrained running. You will need to install it manually:

• Download click package from launchpad
• transfer to your device and install:

1. adb push com.ubuntu.developer.vtuson.logviewer_0.1_armhf.click /home/phablet/

2. adb shell

3. su phablet
4. cd ~

5. pkcon -p install-local com.ubuntu.developer.vtuson.logviewer_0.2_armhf.click

When you launch the app, you will get a list of .log files in /home/phablet/.cache/upstart/ , if you click on an specific log, it will be displayed in a similar manner to tail -f. You can pause the autoreading, clear the screen and copy to clipboard parts of the logs from the bottom menu.

You can also access other files, change font size of the logs and the size of the text buffered from the settings page.

You can see the code and contribute 🙂 in launchpad:

https://launchpad.net/logviewer

We announced today a new solution to dual boot Android and Ubuntu on the same device. Over the last few weeks I have recently blogged about a Contacts import app for Ubuntu and  Techfunder, an Android app for crowd funding projects. What I didn’t mention before is that I have been developing and testing both in the same device!

I have been dog-fooding and developing a small part of our dual boot solution for a couple weeks now.  During that time, I’ve not only been able to boot between Android and Ubuntu as a user, but also as an application developer.

Dual boot brings no compromise to the SDK experience of either operating system.  I run Ubuntu SDK with QTCreator and Android’s ADT (eclipse-based) on my 12.04 LTS laptop.  And while the SDK for Android is more mature and fully featured, I still find Ubuntu (an particularly QML) much faster to prototype apps.

Dual boot is also about making the application developers life easier and cheaper.  Having to buy extra devices for testing new apps can be a put you off. You can now develop for Ubuntu by jusr re-using your Android device.. without having to disrupt your android projects!  For example,  yesterday I was working on applications on both sides, and I was easily booting back and forward and collecting logs in each side.

I hope to see more integration in between both development environments, I think it will be particularly neat to have something like  Android Monitor tool (aka DDMS) working for both OSs.

Btw, I have just released version 2.0 of Techfunder! Including home screen widgets, search and more categories. Don’t forget to check it out:

I have a lot of contacts in my phone… I am sure you will have more, but syncing over 500 contacts to Ubuntu phone using the command line for Syncevolution gets tedious.

So I wrote a little QML app to do the trick for you. Unfortunately, to run a system command the application has to run unconfined, so I have not yet submitted it to the store.

But if you want to install it yourself it is pretty simple:

1. Download this file
2. push the downloaded file to your phone, like so: adb push com.ubuntu.developer.vtuson.contactsimporter_0.9_armhf.click /home/phablet
3. then run this to install it: adb shell “sudo -u phablet pkcon -p install-local  /home/phablet/com.ubuntu.developer.vtuson.contactsimporter_0.9_armhf.click”

You should be good to use it now, the app looks like this: (and if you want to check out the code is here)

So a few months later, the game I was working on has now got to Beta stage. Since last time, I have added a few extra things:

• Proper dogfight with a T50 fighter
• Plane shadows
• Scaling for multiple size screens
• Revamp and multitouch controls
• Collisions and explosions
• Full keyboard control
• Added 13 levels, loaded from level.txt JSON file
• Tutorial walkthrough
• and lots of bug fixes

Still only a Beta, but all the game play is now completed, now it is just fixing bugs 😉 All the code is here, and some screen shots.

https://code.launchpad.net/~vtuson/+junk/dogfight

To make it easier to keep up with the work and progress on the Nexus 7 , I have set up a topic in status.ubuntu.com and a wiki page with the performance goals for the release:

• http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-raring/group/topic-raring-desktop-targets-for-embedded.html
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7/raring-targets

If there is  a missing Blueprint that should be track under this topic, please let me know.

I decided to run some browser performance benchmarks from http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com/ in the Nexus 7 running Ubuntu, mainly to see how it compares with other platforms. Here are my basic conclusions as a result of the test:

• In general Ubuntu + Nexus 7 performs pretty well
• The Nexus 7 with Ubuntu and Chromium (629) performs better that the Android Nexus 7 (489)
• Firefox performance (257) is pretty bad compare with Chromium (629). I have tested it in my laptop and the same different exist, however the more powerful hardware makes it not as relevant.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to access the detailed results (it displays blank), any suggestions why? My results are the bottom firefox (257) results, and the top Chrome (629):