This is the weekly ownCloud community development update for the period of June 2 to June 15. Two weeks this time, as I spent a week in the mountains of Austria! These updates pull together activities from development mailing lists, blogs, coding work and everything else community members share with us. Tips are very much welcome! Ping me with your input.
It was a busy two weeks. Many pull requests got merged in the last two weeks, as everybody hurried to finish things in time for the feature freeze. Much UI work went in, as well as some performance and reliability improvements. The freeze finally happened on June 10, although a few exceptions were made for pull requests very close to the final merge.
Of course, feature freeze means that ownCloud 7 alpha 1 was released on June 11! Congrats to all contributors! Now, everybody, it is time to get involved and start testing!
Meanwhile, in non-technical news, on June 5 we announced the ownCloud Contributor Conference and Hackathon!
With development efforts moving to testing and bugfixing, the coming releases of this report will have fewer or no features in the server to talk about.
You can read a report on week 22 here.
Development
Let’s first go over the pull requests that got merged, then what’s new on apps.owncloud.com and what else there is… There have been many pull requests merged as the week of June 2-8 was the week before the Feature Freeze AND the week of a hackathon in Stuttgart (server) and Berlin (client). It has been very busy!
Core and apps
- Added caching in the app configuration for a more responsive ownCloud.
- There has been lots of further design work:
- The ownCloud web UI became heaps and loads better on smaller screens (mobile devices) with the app list being hidden on the side.
- We happily removed a feature: setting the maximum zip file download size. Thanks to streaming creation of zip files we no longer have to create a zip file first on disk and then send it, introducing a risk of over-filling drives.
- We added a warning about using SQLite on the setup page, pointing to the tool to convert databases. SQLite is great, but can’t handle too much data or user accounts, something ownCloud users should be aware off.
- Now that we get an awesome activity view, we don’t need to email users with changes in shared folders by default.
- To improve reliability of upgrades, an update of the app database is first simulated before it is actually performed.
- This pull request adds a ‘shared with link’ in the files sidebar.
- Last minute discussions to get drag and drop in the mobile UI merged in ownCloud 7. We’re past feature freeze, but will this get an exception?
ownCloud Apps improvements
In the last 2 weeks there have been several updates on apps.owncloud.com:
- The UPnP Port Mapper app is EOL.
- Users of the french TransportMarketPlace will perhaps appreciate the Connect TransportMarketPlace app in ownCloud.
- New is RainLoop webmail integration in ownCloud 6. If you have tried it – share your experiences with it!
- Storage Charts 2.3 brings back support for oC5 and 6.
- Version 0.2 of User Conversations is out, unfortunately the change log isn’t updated yet so I can’t tell you what is new.
- New is Popup 0.1, an app which shows a notification every time the user opens the files app. Sysadmins can in this way share information or explanations about the data with users.
- A minor update to the files tree app, which shows you a full AJAX navigation tree view of your files.
- A brand new app allows you to view GPX files in your browser on ownCloud. Still only 0.1, but off to a great start!
Other development updates
Biggest news the past weeks was the announcement of the feature freeze for ownCloud 7, the release of ownCloud 7 Alpha 1 and the imminent release of ownCloud 6.0.4 (coming next week, if all goes according to plan).
Other releases:
- Version 1.6 of the desktop client came out on June 2. With the soon-to-be-released ownCloud 7, this gives significant performance improvements.
- The ownCloud app for iOS has also been updated. Meanwhile, work has started on background uploading and the team is looking into the new iOS 8 features.
- The Android client had a 1.5.6 and 1.5.7 update, bringing some bugfixes to our users. Work is ongoing on improving notifications and a ‘pull down to refresh’ branch on github was reviewed and merged, while updating & syncing get improvements.
Other ownCloud happenings
On June 5, we announced the ownCloud Contributor Conference and hackathon! From August 26-31 we’ll get together in Berlin to hack on ownCloud and get some serious coding done. Saturday the 30th will feature a day for people interested in learning more about ownCloud coding: we’ll feature lightning talks about development progress as well as workshops and technical talks. Visit the conference site for more information.
On Planet ownCloud we had an extensive blog by Stathis about installing ownCloud on a Raspberry Pi using Lighttpd. It features tips on setting up a RaspberryPi with Arch, then the installation of lighttpd and PHP and finishes off with the ownCloud installation steps. Earlier he did a tutorial of installing ownCloud and openSUSE on the RBPi.
Like every week, Volkan wrote an update on his GSOC project for the 6th week, and another one for week 7. Screenshots included!
Another great project was brought to the attention of our devs on the mailing list by Frank: ownBook. The idea is to allow ownCloud to work as a backend to chromebooks with ChromeOS. This is a call for developers and ideas. If you have a chromebook and would like to use your ownCloud as its data backend – join and see where you can help out!
There are meetups being organized around ownCloud! For those of you living in or close to Berlin or Münich, there will be a meetup every third Wednesday of the month (as in, this week!). All ownCloud meetups will be gathered on owncloud.meetup.com.
ownCloud meetups are to learn more about ownCloud or get coding work done. If you know of other (regular or not) meetups or are interested in organizing one yourself, let me know so I can tell others, help you out, etc!
edit: Missed the improvements in the oC 7 web UI for mobile devices, here and here. Added now. Let me know if I missed something else!
