Welcome to the (Ubuntu Touch) Hive

hive.txt

Imagine sitting/lazily lying on your couch with your tablet,
getting a call from someone on your Ubuntu Touch smartphone,
and having to start working on a document, preferrably in an
environment you are already having a familiarity with.

You get sent an attachment over the internet by someone,
need to include those in your document, and call it a day.
Now how do we make this workflow a simple matter?

Open your laptop and it's just there, and you are in complete
control over that. If you don't want it or don't need it,
then it won't bother you.

Computers are good at automation, humans are not.
You don't need an additional assistant you talk to.
Your phone is your assistant already.

If your devices are aware that others are nearby, over WiFi or BT,
whether it being your other devices or your friends you want
to stay in contact with. If they are too far away to talk to,
then contact them over your Ubuntu Touch phone from wherever you are.
PulseAudio can do a lot for audio, browsers can use webcams now...
great pieces, but how do we fit together what we have now, on xenial?

I see some nice "convenience" features in using a Mac and an iPad together.
We shouldn't let Apple have all of the cake.
(Android? Don't know what they are doing, I'm sorry.)

I call this the Ubuntu Touch Hive right now, but ideally we basically agree
on a set of really cool things across distros and see what benefit it brings.

This is more like Apple AirDrop rather than your personal access with KDE Connect.
This is a different tool, but one could trigger the other, or they exchange data,
with the user having full control over the process in an easy-to-grasp overview.

We don't want our phones ringing all the time either, right?
(Some of us do, right? I mean... I'm not the only one, right?)

:)

But you would be using the Hive your way, it's how you set it up.

So with that being said, I would like to avoid having constant notification about
what device is where and having that data shared over the internet.
There's a question around privacy and some might not want to have that at all,
for various other reasons, so I would like to have this thing go away the instant
moment I say so. Don't need it, don't want it.

But what I do want is having my desktop find my phone for that document instantly
over WiFi, on the same network, as soon as I come home or wake up and have
tasks to work through. I want that document off my phone sent to my laptop immediately.

Use which ever LibreOffice you find on your desktop, be done with your work,
and, if you forgot to push the send button, have the phone tell you about it
and instruct the PC to try a send. I would like to have that from desktop to
my other Ubuntu-powered devices.

Going home from work/waking up for work, check a few boxes and be done.

This is not a cloud service, this doesn't need to be a service.
But your devices sync not documents, they talk to each other and work on
a single "task" for you. Each one with your specific needs (Camera for quick
photos, all triggered from your work device, either laptop or convergent tablet).

I've seen many people rightfully complaining that they don't have that PC to install
Ubuntu on anything. That changed with the phone and tablet efforts.

I see a lot of solutions in the proprietary space, some of which might determine
ultimately what convenience is. And I like convenience as much as I love privacy.

This gist might be updated in the future, but marked respectively underneath as well.