Today, we are pleased to announce the release of MauiKit and Maui Apps 1.1.0!.
Are you a developer and want to start developing cross-platform and convergent apps, targeting, among other things, the upcoming Linux mobile devices? Then join us on Telegram: https://t.me/mauiproject. If you are interested in testing this project and helping out with translations or documentation, you are also more than welcome.
The Maui Project is free and open-source software incubated by the KDE Community and developed by Nitrux Latinoamericana.
We are present on Twitter and Mastodon:
Stable release
The 1.1.0 version brings updates, new features, bug fixes, and an improved cross-platform and convergent experience from the framework to the apps. For this first full release, the packages are distributed directly from the MauiKit official webpage.
Some apps might be missing features or present some bugs if it is the case that you want to report a bug or a feature request you can open a ticket at https://gitlab.com/nitrux/mauikit/maui-bug-tracker. Follow the instructions on how to file an issue.
Although this is not the first release for MauiKit, it is the first official stable release.
The Maui Apps will get a version bump whenever Mauikit gets a version bump to keep them as close as possible to the framework and help both projects grow together. The Maui Project is aiming for the ‘convergent’ environment.
This first release is a massive step towards such a goal. In the future, we want to see Maui Apps and MauiKit on various other devices.
Apps
As of now the Maui Project provides nine applications to cover the basic set of standard utilities: A file manager (Index), music player (VVave), an image viewer (Pix), text editor(Nota), Notes taker (Buho), terminal emulator(Station), contacts manager (Contacts), document viewer (Library) and a video player (Cinema). Some of the apps are in different states, most of them are stable, some of them are more feature-rich, and some others are in early stages.
For this release cycle, we provide packages for Index, VVave, Pix, Nota, Buho, Station, and Contacts.
For users, we provide packages for Linux x64 and ARM (aarch64, a.k.a arm64) devices like Plasma Mobile, APKs for Android, and Windows installers for x64.
And for distribution maintainers, we provide links to the applications and the framework source code.
During this cycle, we added support for macOS and iOS, although, for this 1.1.0 release, we don’t provide official packages for them, you can join us at our channels to keep an eye on testing packages.
Most of the apps gained keyboard shortcuts to make them usable on desktops.
Pix
Pix is the image viewer and gallery manager.
For this release, it has gained some excellent features, such as initial support for doodles and the option to switch from a grid view to a detailed view allowing to group by categories besides sorting.
Pix does not make use of a database system for storing the image collection; instead, it makes use on the file system to list the images from the Pictures and Download folders, that way Pix can more quickly detect them and refresh.
It gained a settings dialog and more configurable options.
Pix received fixes to the viewer, and the thumbnails rollbar now can be scrolled by using the wheel handler.
Known bugs:
- For collections with more than 15000 images, it takes a while to refresh.
- On startup or first scanning the source paths, the gallery view placeholder message is visible, showing there are no images.
- The detailed view does not display selection boxes when the selection mode is on.
- For Windows, the share functionality does not work.
VVave
VVave is a music player.
The delegates were cleaned up and are now faster, it gained an improved focus view, and overall it makes further use of MauiKit templated ‘delegates’ and components.
It has initial support for streaming music from NextCloud servers.
Known bugs:
- For collections with more than 15000 files, it takes a while to refresh.
- The artists’ image artwork fetching from LastFM does not work.
- For Windows, the share functionality does not work.
- Streaming from NextCloud is not super fast.
Index
Index is the file manager.
Supports independent embedded terminals per browser view on macOS and Linux; this means that you can use a terminal per split view and per tabs, allowing you to be more efficient when hacking.
It supports previews for text files, images, PDFs, music, and videos.
It has three different view modes: details, grid, and columns view.
Allows you to quickly tag and browse your files, the ‘tags’ are usable across all the Maui apps, so music tracks or images tagged on VVave or Pix, respectively, can be accessed from Index.
Also, the Columns view now has a proper scrollbar at the bottom for better scrolling between the multiple path columns.
Known bugs:
- For Android and Windows (not using KIO), listing busy directories freezes the UI until it finishes.
- For Windows, the share functionality does not work.
- The rename dialog sometimes picks the wrong file.
Nota
The simple text editor now includes more configurable options, such as new focus mode, switching on and off the syntax highlighting, and editor background color options.
Features split views and embedded terminal per tab.
A focus mode to focus on the task of editing the text entirely.
Known bugs:
- Split views can not be closed.
- For Windows, the share functionality does not work.
- The highlighting does not take effect immediately.
- The settings dialog option for changing the font size is affected by Maui Style not styling correctly the Combobox.
- The editor lines numbers sometimes overlap.
Buho
A better list/details view beside the cards view.
Gained more stability coming to form MauiKit Editor improvements.
The editor for new notes is no longer a small popup dialog but instead takes full app size using a stack view.
Notes can be synchronized using a NextCloud server with the Notes app installed.
Known bugs:
- You can’t insert images into notes.
- For Android, the Links cards do not save the webpage image.
- The books UI is messy.
- The synchronization of notes happens on the app startup. To add new sticky-notes to Buho, restart the application.
- The favorite filtering button on the note’s view does not work.
- There’s no way to select multiple notes.
- The sharing features don’t work.
Station
Station now correctly closes open tabs, and the split views work as expected.
It also now uses the MauiKit ToolActions.
Known bugs:
- Split views can not be closed.
- For QmlTermWidget version 1.0, the color scheme option does not work.
Contacts
Contacts app is the contacts manager and dialer for phones
Known bugs:
- It has conflicts with some KPeoplevcard libs from some distros on Linux, so it might result in not saving the contacts correctly
- For Android loading, a significant contacts database might be sluggish
- It doesn’t work in Windows.
- It’s missing several optional fields.
- Dialer hooks the calls to the platform default dialer.
MauiKit
The framework has gained new controls, and the previous ones have been cleaned up and improved. Same for the back end utilities like the file management classes and templated models. For more information, you should check the previous blog posts about the progress leading to the 1.1.0 release:
https://nxos.org/maui/maui-weekly-report
https://nxos.org/maui/maui-weekly-report-2/
https://nxos.org/maui/maui-weekly-report-3/
https://nxos.org/maui/maui-weekly-report-4/
In addition to this, we have also adopted the LGPL 3.0 as the license for the MauiKit framework. MauiKit and the Maui Applications are Free and Open Source Software and use the LGPL v3 License.
Maui Style
The style was reviewed for better supporting desktop devices on Windows and macOS and AppImages, besides the previous support for Android phones or touch-based devices.
Known bugs:
- Combobox and spinbox not styled correctly.
- Missing styles for non-touch devices.
- Missing styles for macOS.
New components:
- Doodle, to make quick notes over images or components.
- AppViews, to organize the main application views and handle the navigation.
- AppViewLoader.
- CSDControls, using the work form psifidotos applet-window-button, picks on Linux the right window decoration buttons.
- The ‘SettingsDialog’ is a quick way to organize the app configurable settings.
- SettingsSection.
- Shapes: X, Arrow, Checkmark, Rectangle, and Triangle are not image assets but drawn by Qt.
- AltBrowser, to switch easily between a grid and list view.
Updated components:
- Page, gained more properties for interacting with the toolbars, now can be floating, auto-hiding, pullback, and set the value hints.
- The toolBar is now flickable with touch and scrollable by mouse and added farLeftContent and farRightContent to a better layout.
- SelectionBar
- more easily reusable
- The dialog now has better default buttons and a close button that follows the system window close side.
- TabBar is full width, templated with an additional tab button.
- TabButton includes a title and close button that follows the system preferences.
- ToolActions, now visually groups related actions and can be collapsed into a menu.
- The application about dialog now displays credits.
- The ListItemTemplate GriditemTemplate has been improved and is now checkable; Maui Apps use these components.
- Editor and the DocumentHandler use din Buho, and Nota and Index text previewer is now more stable and includes more properties.
Bug fixes:
- Editor syntax highlighting would make the app crashes by a race condition between setting the text source and the style.