Owncloud

The first part of this little blog series explained the basic operations of chunk file upload as we set it up for discussion. This part goes a bit beyond and talks about an addition to that, called announcing the upload. With the processing described in the first part of the blog, the upload is done savely and with a clean approach, but it also has some drawbacks. Most notably the server does not know the target filename of the uploaded file upfront....

Recently Thomas and me met in person and thought about an alternative approach to bring our big file chunking to the next level. “Big file chunking” is ownClouds algorithm to upload huge files to ownCloud with clients. This is the first of three little blog posts in which we want to present the idea and get your feedback. This is for open discussion, nothing is set in stone so far....

Today, we’re happy to release the best ownCloud Desktop Client ever to our community and users! It is ownCloud Client 1.8.0 and it will push syncing with ownCloud to a new level of performance, stability and convenience. [caption id=“attachment_586” align=“alignleft” width=“300”] The Share Dialog[/caption]This release brings a new integration into the operating system file manager. With 1.8.0, there is a new context menu that opens a dialog to allow the user to create a public link on a synced file....

Often questions come up about the meaning of FileIDs and ETags. Both values are metadata that the ownCloud Server stores for each of the files and directories in the server database. These values are fundamentally important for the integrity of data in the overall system. Here are some thoughts about what they are why these are so important.This is mainly from a clients point of view, but there are other use cases as well....

[caption id=“attachment_548” align=“alignright” width=“240”] Nautilus Shell, David Bygott[/caption] Incremental Sync is probably the feature that most people ask, or even sometimes cry for. Recently there was another wave of discussion about ownCloud is doing incremental sync or not. I will try again (as in this issue) to explain why we decided to slowing that feature. Slowing means that it will be done later, not never, as it was stated. It is just that we think that other things benefit the whole idea of ownCloud more....

Our recent ownCloud Client 1.7.0 release contains the new feature of overlay icons in GNOME nautilus, MacOSX and Windows. That is nice, but that makes us as old KDE guys sad as Dolphin was missing on the list. [caption id=“attachment_536” align=“alignnone” width=“554”] KDE’s Dolphin with overlay icons for ownCloud’s file sync[/caption] That needs to change, and here we go: Olivier Goffart wrote a patch to do overlay icons also in Dolphin, which was not straightforward, because in addition to an dolphin plugin, also a patch for libkonq was required....

Last week, Thomas, Christian and myself were attending a workshop in CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneve, Switzerland. CERN is a very inspiring place, attracting intelligent people from all over the world to get behind the secrets of our being. I felt honored to be at the place where for example the world wide web was invented. The event was called Workshop on Cloud Services for File Synchronisation and Sharing and was hosted by CERN IT department....

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....

Because it is still reported that the ownCloud Client has an increasing memory footprint when running for long time I am trying to monitor the QObject tree of the client. Valgrind does not report any memory problems with it so my suspicion was that somewhere QObjects are created with valid parent pointers referencing a long living object. These objects might accumulate unexpectedly over time and waste memory. So I tried to investigate the app with Qt Inspector of Robert Knight....

Yesterday, we released ownCloud 7. You might have read that somewhere on the internet - it was widely announced and broadly picked up. If you do not have ownCloud yet, you really should try it now, and if you are one of the people happily using ownCloud for a while, update soon! In my opinion, ownCloud 7 is a real step ahead. So much work went into it from the brave server guys, and the result is simply impressive: It is fast, beautiful and fully focused on what it is supposed to be and do: File sync and share, even though you still have of course all the other useful stuff like calendaring and such....