Today and tomorrow we cover a full month of ownCloud development activities, giving you an overview of what was going on in August. It was a crazy month, with a massive amount of activity resulting in a long report, so we’ve split it up in two! If you have any tips or input, let us know in the comments below or ping Jos with your thoughts.
Of course the highlight of August was the last week, being the ownCloud Contributor Conference! An extensive report on the event can be found here and the videos of the talks are on our youtube channel. But before and during the hackathon part of the conference a lot of coding was done, as you’ll see in the pull request section below and the activity on apps.owncloud.com tomorrow. We highlight some ongoing work as well, including two exciting upcoming apps: Maps and Mail!
Our previous development report can be found here.
Development
The list of interesting pull requests is huge. Not only because we cover almost 5 weeks rather than the usual two in an effort to catch up, but also because with the ownCloud 7 release out for a while, developers are turning their attention back to feature work.
Making resizing smarter
Core improvements
Let’s go over the most notable pull requests in Core first. With so much going on it is hard to pick the top changes, but a few things do stand out:
Some re-factoring was done and API additions were made to make ownCloud easier to develop with and for. The Code Checker tool, which attempts to block app developers from using private API’s showed some false positives, resulting in some debate and work on it is still ongoing. And there were a lot of small improvements in the development version of ownCloud which are back ported to ownCloud 7 and even 6.
- The LDAP authentication will now auto-detect email addresses – this will come in ownCloud 7.0.3 as well
- The ability to show/hide last login and storage location in user management was the first feature contribution from stephane84 that got merged
- implemented momentjs to get rid of the many duplicate functions for date formatting in core
- Some basic bug fixes by ockham got merged. Question now is: to squash or not to squash?
- The new mount point rename ability in ownCloud 7 caused some issues which of course were fixed
- Conference keynote speaker Dan Callahan made his first contribution with “set email input field to type=email” so mobile clients show the proper keyboard layout to users
- In ownCloud 7 you can allow users to add their own external storage thanks to this work
- A massive performance improvement for Swift object stores, streaming downloads, was developed and back ported to the stable 7 branch
- A system administrator can now configure a ‘skeleton directory’ with default files for new users
- A long discussion on this pull request for faster svg preview generation resulted in a series of improvements to preview generations (including this one)- though the original PR never got merged
- this pull request fixes issues with the header bar visible in some apps like the ODF and text editors
- The command line tool available to handle upgrades to ownCloud is now referenced on the upgrade screen so users who experience time-outs know what to do. This is back ported to 7 as well
- Work is done to accommodate the desktop client and improve the reliability of syncing when users rename files
- Icons in the sync client are now more consistent
- There is some re-factoring going on around session management, making it less prone to errors… PR 1 and PR 2
- Improvements went into the automated code checker which ensures apps can’t use private API’s. More discussion about making it smarter and generate less false positives is going on
- ownCloud introduced smarter handling of issues with missing or renamed files
- Work was done to make the breadcrumb bar behave better in various (and changing) window sizes
- A new version of Archive was integrated, improving tar support
- If your ownCloud doesn’t handle ttf files, things won’t break anymore
- Long filenames are now nicely ellipcised
- An update to lucene should improve searching
New look coming soon to Android
App improvements
Outside of core and core apps, the apps included in or verified and supported by the ownCloud team also received a lot of attention. Most notable was the work on the Music, Gallery, Chat and News apps, making them look prettier and improving functionality. There has also been security work, including a rename and description improvements in the Encryption App. And finally, image handling and showing in the Android client has been much improved.
- Upgrading apps will now happen the same way the core is upgraded, improving reliability and feedback to the user
- The Gallery app re-introduced the nice fade-in effect, an improved readability and a 4-images folder preview (more awesomeness incoming from the same author)
- During the conference, the Aurora.js framework was integrated in the Music app making it possible to play MP3 and FLAC files without browser plugins
- Mozilla Sync now has documentation and you can see limits of your ownCloud in the user interface
- The Chat app now uses a pop-over for invites! Chat also automatically resizes the text content area when needed, some further UI work was done with more here and chat archives can be removed
- To explain the way the Encryption App works better, it got renamed to Server-side Encryption and received a better description (see our earlier blog about how ownCloud uses encryption for more details)
- The Encryption App uses the user password to encrypt files so the user should be warned of the consequences when he/she changes the password. Another change is the ability to use AES 256 for more secure encryption
- The External Sites app was improved over all
- The Music app can now do a rescan of your music from the command line and it introduced a RESTful API
- The web UI of the news app was improved, and the API was extended with the ability to rename feeds
- The activity view now shows public uploads
- Calendars deal better with multiple users
- The Android app now has a better looking image gallery, ability to zoom in on the images and much improved accounts settings
We hope you enjoyed this installment of our development updates. Remember, it is easy to get involved yourself and add to this list. Stay tuned for the second part tomorrow, when we will cover some exciting new apps and updates to the many apps in the app store, as well as what was going on on the ownCloud mailing lists.
