ownCloud development in April

Github in action

Frank and myself thought it would be nice to have a weekly development update around the ownCloud community. It makes it easier for people to follow what is going on, we can't all follow all mailing lists and git logs and forums and so on. To start this up I went through information sources like the development mailing list, blogs, news and more and compiled an article about the whole month of April. If you all like it, I can start doing this weekly.

Now I can't follow everything either, of course, so it would be helpful if you, dear readers, could send what YOU know is going on to me! That would ensure I don't miss any cool things. Mail me or ping me over G+, twitter or somewhere else! Any suggestion is welcome.

UI mockups of new features

Development

So, let's start with what happened in ownCloud development in April, separated by core, cloud and clients. Note that what is below is not guaranteed to end up in a release! We might re-design things, defer to a later release to give it more testing or change the feature otherwise...

ownCloud core

• Work is happening to refine the oC 7 public API.
• Lots of work on LDAP improvements (much of that landed in 6.0.3, see this blog)
• Some work is done for improving support for high dpi screens! See PR 1 and PR 2 for details.
• Progress on a tool for conversion of data between various databases
• Some neat 'ajaxification' in the core, making way for:
• infinite scrolling for files app got merged!
• file sorting (by clicking column headers) is under development, needs review and help...
• The new user management from this pull request is almost ready to be merged!
• There is a project going on to make the normal ownCloud UI more usable on mobile devices. Help is of course very welcome as this is a lot of work!

Good old fashioned paper mockup

ownCloud apps

• work is going on to improve the view on what happened on your ownCloud in the activity app
• Infinite scrolling & neater layout for pictures app are coming.
• A much improved music app is coming, and a variety of features is under development, like new playlist functionality.

ownCloud clients

• The iOS saw work on multiple-downloads support. Not finished yet but a future version should include this. There was also work on the 'favorite files' feature.
• The Android client got the InstantUpload video branch finally merged. This means that once released, the client can upload video instantly, either always or only when on wifi. Thanks to zerginator for doing the hard work!
• The first beta for the 1.6 release of the desktop client came out and a bunch of bugs got fixed based on the feedback that came in. If you have not tried the new release, help us test it so we can make it even better. Read more about this upcoming release in this blog by Danimo.

Devel mailing list discussions

The entire month saw lots of bugfixes fly by on the devel mailing list. The news app, for example, now deals better with a host of websites, but also got reworked to be finally independent from the app framework. Meanwhile, there's a firefox plugin being developed for the News app, courtesy of our Outreach Program for Women participation.

Visual bugreports with screenshots.

Listing apps

Jan-Christoph announced that he had put together a page listing the central ownCloud apps as well as mobile and desktop clients. There is also a section 'external apps to integrate with'. With this overview he hopes to encourage collaboration over fragmentation. See the page here.

Vincent Petry brought a python client library to the ownCloud list, spawning a discussion about the need for perhaps a JavaScript library as well.

In other news

The bugfix release ownCloud 6.0.3 brought new bugfixes and improved LDAP performance.

The wider FOSS world saw Canonical retire Ubuntu One, to which we replied offering Ubuntu users to come and try out ownCloud. As Frank wrote when Box announced they'd open source some of the tools they use in-house for system administration and engineering:

"Depending on a vendor is always risky: the vendor can go bankrupt, be bought or raise prices. In the world of web services it also often happens that vendors decide to discontinue functionality they deem not crucial enough. It could just be something you depend on!"

ownCloud can be run on your own servers, not requiring you to move your data to an untrusted, third-party server farm." See his blog post.

Conclusion

I hope you liked the ownCloud development update of April! Obviously, the weekly ones should be shorter than this one. Let me know in the comments what you think about doing this every week. If you all think it is a good idea, I'll move this to the ownCloud blog.