Today we talked to Christian Schabensberger, a recent contributor to ownCloud, about his personal story with ownCloud, and how he started contributing.
Hi Schabi, what are you contributing to ownCloud?
I’ve created the OCBookmarks Android app for both ownCloud and Nextcloud.
How long have you been using ownCloud/Nextcloud in total, what did you start with?
I used Nextcloud first, for about a month. It was version 12.0.1 back then – after that I switched to ownCloud.
So what made you switch to ownCloud?
Having tried both, Nextcloud felt a little like ownCloud in the earlier days. I had the feeling that some of the bugs that existed back then still exist in Nextcloud. All in all ownCloud now feels more elaborate.
Some examples?
1. When I tried to reimport some of my contacts as vCards into my contact storage, nothing happened. I read the log and googled a little, and found out that I should have created an address book before I could add those contacts. Nothing told me there was no existing contact book or I should create one.
2. When I was able to add contacts it took a really long time, and some failed to be imported at all, so I had to get through the whole contact list and see which were not imported.
Both worked immediately on ownCloud 10.
3. When I tried to import calendar data, Nextcloud didn’t show anything until the import was completed. So you would only hope that Nextcloud is importing the files properly in the background. ownCloud shows a loading bar there, so you at least get a little feedback.
4. Using Tasks with Nextcloud was pain, and that was the straw that broke the camels back. Updating tasks either via WebApp or Thunderbird was too slow. With Thunderbird it was only possible to make one action at a time. That means I could delete one task, but than I had to wait a while until anything would happen.
Tasks on android is always a pain even under ownCloud, but this seems to be a problem with openTasks, and DAVdroid.
5. When developing the android app OCBookmarks I used to cooperate with some devs of Nextcloud who created the bookmarks app for Nextcloud. They added an API to sync bookmarks (which ownCloud didn’t have by then). However they had an interesting way of developing a REST API.
They introduced their second version of the API as v2. Then from one version to another 0.10.0 -> 0.10.1 they suddenly changed the API, but still made it available as v2, which broke my app.
What is your favorite ownCloud app?
Hard to tell, I need all of them, although I miss a note taking app and a KeeWeb app to open .kdbx files in the browser.
You have a few projects on your own, right? Anything to recommend?
Yes, apart from developing the OCBookmarks app for Android, I wrote NewPipe, a Youtube frontend for Android, several other smaller projects, and help to release the Beta version of the ownCloud Android app on F-Droid.
The community thanks you for your contributions!
Schabi giving a talk about NewPipe
