Some of the most annoying issues have been fixed

Jul 4, 2015 17:05 GMT  ·  By

Canonical's Alejandro J. Cura had the great pleasure of reporting a few hours ago that the upcoming OTA-5 update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system will get some attractive new features in the Unity 8 user interface.

Therefore, we can tell you today that the upcoming OTA-5 update for Ubuntu Touch will bring an updated Unity 8 user interface that includes a brand-new thumbnailer used by the Camera and Gallery apps, as well as by several Scopes to quickly fetch, resize and cache images from pictures and videos.

We reported news about the all-new thumbnailer a week ago, when the Ubuntu Touch and Unity API teams seek for testers to plug existing bugs and finalize it. The thumbnailer will be especially used with GStreamer to create screenshots of video streams.

"Last week’s call for testing of the new thumbnailer helped us debug and isolate some issues with collections of big images in apps using the thumbnailer. We already submitted the silo to QA, but we will wait for fixes in Gallery app before landing it," says Alejandro J. Cura.

OTA-5 to bring support for refunds of purchased apps

Besides the brand-new thumbnailer, the OTA-5 update for Ubuntu Touch will also update the payment service and Click Scope to support refunds of purchased apps from the Ubuntu Store. The automatic refunds system will work only in the first 15 minutes after purchasing and installing the respective apps.

There will also be a fix for an issue with the notifications where the phone stopped to vibrate after an alarm was activated, a fix for a battery drain issue related to uninstalling or updating Scopes, a fix for a delay with empty Dash when installing an app by smoothing refreshing of Scopes, as well as some Snappy Scope improvements.