Yesterday we covered what happened in core and apps in part I of our ownCloud development in August. Today, we will highlight some cool, upcoming projects and give you a taste of the activities in the ownCloud app store and on our mailing lists.
owncloud maps in action
Upcoming awesome
Let’s start with sharing a few work-in-progress things which are worth looking at.
First of all, check out the great work ockham is doing on the long standing issue of unifying tag handling in ownCloud. Go review this pull request and help bring tags to all of ownCloud! And what’s next, a generic way of commenting on objects in ownCloud? If you have ideas, make it happen!
The Google Summer of Code work on the Music app, which will bring in a much improved play list, is almost done and merging will hopefully happen soon! You will barely recognize this great app after these massive improvements.
August saw a new app begin development: ownCloud maps. It is meant to become a Google or Bing Maps competitor, allowing you to find but also create and, in time, share location-based information. It is built on Leaflet, using Open Street Map data. While it only started recently, it has seen steady improvements, and you can contribute to and download the app for testing from github.
But Maps is not the only new app in github this month. At the ownCloud Contributor Conference another new ownCloud App was announced: Mail. During the last two months a massive amount of work was done on this app and you can check out the current state and the swift progress on github.com/owncloud/mail. Stay tuned for news on this app. Currently the team is working towards a 0.1 release and you’re welcome to test it and report any issues or feature requests you may have. Once 0.1 is out, we’ll cover it!
In ownCloud app news
There was again a lot of activity on apps.owncloud.com:
- ownCloud 7 versions were released of the Epub and Comics reader, Usage Charts and the Files Tree app
- Last month saw a number of new apps appear:
- The brand new Restricted Access app makes it possible to create a ‘limited access user’ who can only share and work on documents, not upload private files
- ATNotes is the latest in the notes app department, forming a strong competitor
- In other Notes news, a Tomboy App provides ownCloud with Tomboy Sync server abilities
- ocGame brings a bunch of small games to ownCloud
- GeoLoc promises Geolocation: your data stored on your ownCloud
- Latest new kid on the block is File Comments which allows you to share comments on files with other users! Yes, the work on unifying tag handling comes to mind!
- then there were bugfixes and small improvements…
- The ownCloud OCR app can now extract text from PDF files
- The Files Move app received some bugfixes
- CKEditor was updated with a better user experience but doesn’t advertise ownCloud 7 support (yet?)
- JavaScript XMPP Chat continues to mature, with 0.8.2 fixing some minor bugs
- The fresh Passman password manager app was updated with bugfixes
- Subphonic, which lets you play music from Subsonic in ownCloud, got minor fixes
- Usage Charts got a minor update
- The Working Together (Lock files in WebUI) app released an IE11 bufix
Other development updates
On the development mailing list there were of course discussions about the ownCloud Contributor Conference (where do I find cheap hotels? Please submit your talks! and so on); there were the usual releases and the announcement that ownCloud has a bountysource page. Other discussions include:
- ownCloud 7.0.1, our first bugfix release, was released on August 4 with ownCloud 7.0.2 available at the end of the month and 7.0.3 in the making
- ownCloud desktop client 1.7.0 alpha and later beta became available for testing. There is still time to find issues, help out in making this release as stable as possible!
- Jörn started a discussion about when we consider an issue solved which is still ongoing
If you’re interested in following the discussions in real time, consider joining the devel mailing list.
Other ownCloud happenings
On Planet ownCloud we were treated with lots of activity. An overview:
- Two blogs about ownCloud community statistics and the meaning of those numbers
- A review contest where you could win a Banana Pi – and three winners
- Blogs by Lindsey about her Google Summer of Code project: notes on xml parsing and a state of the application. See also her presentation at the ownCloud Conference
- Ledfan announced ownCloud chat beta
- Frank appeared on the Linux Action Show
- Stathis wrote loads of blogs about the awesome things you can do with ownCloud, including ownCloud 7 on a Raspberry Pi, ownCloud 7 on FirefoxOS and upgrading an openShift instance with ownCloud 7. It might not be a surprise that he is one of the winners of the review contest!
- Raghu wrote about ownCloud 7 design and his GSOC evaluation
- Volkan Gezer did a review of ownCloud 7
- and the ownClouders blog featured an article about how we use encryption in ownCloud to protect your data
With so much activity, August has been a crazy month. We didn’t cover everything – there was more going on, as always. We have IRC channels (#owncloud and #owncloud-dev on freenode), social media accounts like Google Plus, YouTube, Facebook, twitter and so on, forums, other mailing lists and many, many more channels of communication and activity. Remember, it is easy to get involved yourself!
For those who like to meet in person, you can find fellow ownCloud users and developers at ownCloud meetups or see us at conferences. Find a calendar of ownCloud events on owncloud.org/events. ownCloud meetups are a chance to learn more about ownCloud or even to get coding work done. If you know of other (regular or not) meetups or are interested in organizing one yourself, check out this page on how to get an event going.
