Blogs

Short before Christmas here is another present for you: After more than one year without release I am happy to announce the availability of Kraft 0.50, the latest version of the KDE software for easy quote and invoice management. The most important change is that now multiple tax rates are supported within one document. That means that within e.g. one invoice items without tax, with reduced and full tax rate are supported. The sum calculation takes that in consideration properly. That enables Kraft for even more usecases. ...

On Friday I arrived back from Berlin where I had the pleasure to work with my great colleague Danimo and our friends from Woboq, Markus and Olivier, in the Woboq Headquarter in Berlin Kreuzberg for a week. We thought that it might be fun to work together on csync, our sync engine under the hood of the ownCloud client. There were some issues that should be fixed and on the way we cleaned and improved quite some code in csync. ...

I spent the last weekend in Prague at the openSUSE conference 2012. It was a great opportunity to visit the wonderful city of Prague and meet old friends from the openSUSE community and get a bit more involved into openSUSE again. I gave a talk about ownCloud on Saturday where I tried to show some technical details. That could have gone even deeper was the feedback some people gave me so I promise to show more of for example app development next time. Apart from that (and apart from the fact that laptops, projectors and Linux still do not play well) the talk went ok and was well received. ...

Along with todays ownCloud 4.5 release we released the new ownCloud Client 1.1.0 with a new syncing concept. This blog will shed some light on the details. I apologize, it’s a long read. Time Issues ownCloud Client versions 1.0.x worked with csyncs traditional way of using the file modification times to detect updates between the two repositories that should be synced to each other. That works fine and conforms to our idea to ideally not use any other metadata in syncing than what the file system has anyway. ...

as you might know, ownCloud uses the Open Build Service (short OBS) to produce and distribute the binary packages for the various distributions we want to support. The OBS is a great system as it does not only build for various Linuxes but also lets the users download the binary packages utilizing a huge mirroring infrastructure. All for you, all for the good of free software. And there is even more: OBS offers a nice download page which can either be embedded into a projects webpage or be linked from it. Depending on the settings of the OBS project, for example the number of Linuxes it builds for, the page is adopted automatically. So you never again have to deal with lots of download links to the projects repository downloads. See the ownCloud Client Package download page as an living example. ...

Akademy 2012 isn’t far any more and I just registered for a BOF at this years Akademy in Tallin. It will take place in Room 419 on monday, July 2nd, 2012 at 10:30. Subject of the BOF will be the integration between KDE and ownCloud. As onwCloud originated from the KDE project we should meet and think together again how we can provide useful integration for the users combining the power of both technologies. ...

It’s release day today: This morning, ownCloud 4 was released! With a very cool set of features it’s even more useful and again more fun to use. Along with that I am happy to let you know that we also released the ownCloud Desktop Client in version 1.0.2. It is a maintenance release with a couple of important bugfixes, such as the cross platform filename encoding problem I was already talking about. Apart from that big blocker a couple of smaller, but annoying problems were fixed. Also the GUI was polished, text changes here and there and a new icon set that looks more cool and more like ownCloud. ...

Writing cross platform code is easy nowadays. You use Qt, implement stuff, and it compiles and runs almost everywhere. I also enjoy that in my work on the ownCloud desktop client. But, as you know, there is the other part in the client called csync. Its the syncing engine underneath. And that does not build up on Qt, but is plain C. Adventure starts here. This bug took me on an interesting (well…) journey into what cross platform really means.It is about a complex thing like filenames containing special characters, my favorite example is the directory “Übergröße”. Directories and files like this could not successfully be synced with the latest client. ...

This week we prepared another ownCloud sync client (oCC) release for you. oCC is released together with csync 0.50.5, the underlying library on which shoulders oCC stands. Find packages for your distribution. Only a couple of weeks after the first release we could come up with a quite long changelog, larger than for a maintainance release. First and foremost, oCC now supports SSL connections and does not store passwords any more, well, in clear text in a config file. Still there is no strong encryption for the password in (as that’s a non trivial if not impossible thing) but its not clear text any more, so accidents should not longer happen. For those who really care and put security over convenience there now is the option to not store the password at all but provide it at startup. The whole password storage will get more attention soon, I did some work on that already, also using kwallet, more on that in another post. ...

[caption id=“attachment_48” align=“alignleft” width=“92” caption=“Build it!”][/caption] people were asking how to set up a development setup for the syncing client we are working on to sync local files to ownCloud and vice versa currently, work title mirall. While a website about it is not yet finished, I try to summarize it here. There are some hacks here and there but that’s how I do it today. It will improve over time. Note that this is about a real development setup, not for a production build. ...