Mirall

Yesterday we released ownCloud Client 1.7.0. It is available via ownCloud’s website. This client release marks the next big step in open source file synchronization technology and I am very happy that it is out now. The new release brings two lighthouse features which I’ll briefly describe here. Overlay icons For the first time, this release has a feature that lives kind of outside the ownCloud desktop client program. That nicely shows that syncing is not only a functionality living in one single app, but a deeply integrated system add-on that affects various levels of desktop computing. ...

You might have heard, ownCloud Client 1.4.0 was released last week. It is available from our sync clients page for all major desktop platforms, investigate the Changelog. Danimos Visual Guide has outlined the new stuff in the release already, so no need to repeat it here. You should install and try it, that seems to be the opinion of many people who tried it. Also people who shared their critical view on the client very publically in the past are much more pleased now with 1.4.0. One example is a recent blog post on BITBlokes. It is a blog about all kind of topics around FOSS. I regularly read it and often share its opinions. He concludes very positively about the 1.4.0 client. ...

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. ...

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. ...

It has been a busy week where I was working on the ownCloud Desktop sync client. As described in my last post this will be based on a csync module to handle ownCloud as well as mirall, a Qt based desktop client to sync. That involved basically three things: A csync module, a patch in ownCloud and work on mirall. For csync, there needs to be a module that handles the connection to ownCloud, for code see [1]. ownCloud has a WebDAV interface, and its used for this. Csync requires the the implementation of a couple of POSIX functions such as opendir, readdir, closedir, stat and these kind of things. I did that using WebDAV equivalents. ...