Kraft is software for the Linux desktop to handle quotes and invoices in the small business.

This is a version packed with bugfixes and also new features. The most important fixes were in the area of the catalog handling: Based on bug reports from the community the catalog window was completely reworked. Drag and drop of items in the catalog, the sorting and reordering of items are now working properly and as planned.

Another big addition is the support of . XRechnung is an E-invoicing format more and more mandatory in the governmental area in Germany. We are very proud that Kraft is the first open source office tool that supports that standard in a user friendly way. All invoices can now also exported in the XRechnung-XML format.

Beside these two big improvements, there are lots of others. For example, the user manual was further improved and is available also in Dutch. A lot of other smaller but non the less important improvements and fixes make version 0.98 a valueable release.

We wish a lot of fun with this new improved version of Kraft!

Kraft Version 0.95

With version 0.95 we do a big step forward in the way of generating documents: Until now (more than fifteen years!) Kraft uses the ReportLab python library to create high quality PDF documents.

While this has served us well, it has always been cumbersome to adopt the template for users needs. ReportLab uses a XML format as the template which has a bit of a steep learning curve and is not really easy with syntax.

This changes now: From version 0.95, Kraft supports the cool project WeasyPrint. The principle remains the same: The document is built of a text based template which defines the look of the output document. That gets filled with the document data and gets converted to a PDF document. But unlike ReportLab, Weasyprint is HTML based. Many people know a bit of HTML and thus will have an way easier time to adopt the template to personal needs.

Apart from the ease of use, it is much more simple to do modern report design with Weasyprint, as it supports the wide range of CSS styling.

That is a great improvement, as adopting Krafts output to personal needs is much more intuitive now. For now, Kraft supports both rendering engines, but ReportLab based reports are deprecated now and support will end in future releases of Kraft.

Along with integration of Weasyprint the text templating library Grantlee was added, as it is the standard in the KDE/Qt world, well maintained and widely available. The ctemplate library which was used for that so far will also be deprecated.

The other great improvement in this release is that Kraft now has a user manual embedded which will give new users a guiding help. It will open in the browser once the user clicks on the menu entry in the help menu, also without internet connection. It was started by a community member and it will grow and improve over time.

As usual this new version also ships an amount of bug fixes and small improvements which can be found in the Changelog.

We wish all users big fun with this remarkable new version of Kraft.

Followup Documents

A great new feature is the completely reworked handling of so called follow-up documents. Kraft has this feature to help dealing with docs that follow on a certain kind of predecessor doc in the business flow, such as an invoice follows on an offer once the work has been finished.

To achieve that and to have all the items of the offer again referenced in the invoice, the Kraft user justs clicks on the menu item “Create Followup Document” on the selected offer, and the new doc is created with all the items of the offer prepared. It is ready to be adjusted to the final invoice details.

Now with version 0.90 this has even improved. Often, the flow is a bit different because a partial invoice is sent while the job is still in progress, for example to cover cost for material. A partial invoice usually has only one item, which is the progress payment the customer should pay.

Kraft users can handle that now very easy: The new UI does not only allow to choose from which predecessor document the final invoice should copy the items (which usually is the offer in the beginning) but it also realises that a partial invoice was sent before, so this amount of payment has to be substracted from the final invoice. Kraft adds an item to the final doc automatically here.

This helps to create high quality documents for your customers even faster, which is exactly the mission of Kraft.

Other Improvements

In addition to that, as usual a lot of other visible and invisible changes have gone into this release. For example, the UI has been simplified again by a clean up of the menu for example. The About Kraft dialog was removed and integrated into the Kraft information page.

Under the hood, we finally added unit tests, which is just a start so far, and ntroduced a new, XML based system to manage the available document types which makes igrations way easier. Last but not least the python based pdf conversion script was ported to python 3 to be ready for the end of python 2.

Community

Last but not least, Kraft got new contributions from the community: A new document type was initiated by a community member, which is a offer like document without showing the price information. Also, the complete app was translated to Dutch by a volunteer, and the translation is now shipped with Kraft by default. Also, other smaller bugfixes went in.

Thank you all for your help to improve Kraft.

A couple of days ago version 0.82 was released. It mainly is a bugfix release, but it also comes with a few new features. Users were asking for some new functions that they needed to switch to Kraft with their business communication, and I am always trying to make that a priority.

The most visible feature is a light rework of the calculation dialog that allows users to do price calculations for templates. It was cleared up, superflous elements were finally removed and the remaining ones now work as expected. The distinction between manual price and calculated price should be even more clear now. Time calculations can now not only done in the granularity of minutes, as this was to coarse for certain usecases. The unit for a time slice can now be either seconds, minutes or hours.

[caption id=“attachment_936” width=“516”] New calculation dialog in 0.82[/caption]

Apart from that, for example sending documents per email was fixed, and in addition to doing it through thunderbird, Kraft can now also utilize the xdg-email tool to work with the desktop standard mail client, such as KMail.

Quite a few more bugfixes make this a nice release. Check the full Changelog! Update is recommended.

Thanks for your comments or suggestions about Kraft!

Version 0.81 is a bugfix release for the previous version 0.80, which was the first stable release based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks5. Even though it came with way more new features than just the port, it’s first release has proven it’s stability in day-to-day business now for a few month.

Kraft 0.81 mainly fixes building with Qt 5.11, and a few other installation- and AppStream metadata glitches. The only user visible fix is that documents do not show the block about individual taxes on the PDF documents any more if the document only uses one tax rate.

Thanks for your suggestions and opinions that you might have about Kraft!

Kraft is desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well choosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local.

After more than a dozen years of life time, Kraft is now reaching a new level: It is now completely ported to Qt5 / KDE Frameworks 5 and with that, it is compatible with all modern Linux distributions again.

KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5 are the best base for modern desktop software and Kraft integrates seamlessly into all Linux desktops. Kraft makes use of the great KDE PIM infrastructure with KAddressbook and Akonadi.

In addition to the port that lasted unexpectedly over 12 months, Kraft v. 0.80 got a whole bunch of improvements, just to name some examples:

More Flexible Addressbook Integration

As Akonadi is optional now, Kraft can be built without it. Even if it was built with, but Akonadi for whatever reason is not working properly, Kraft still runs smoothly. In that case it only lacks the convenience of address book integration.

The Address book access was also nicely abstracted so that other Addressbook backends can be implemented more easily.

GUI Improvements

Even though the functionality and GUI of Kraft was not changed dramatically compared to the last stable KDE 4 version, there were a few interesting changes in the user interface.

• A new, bigger side bar simplifies navigation.
• In the timeline view, a click on years and month in the treeview show summaries of the selected time span, ie. the number of documents with financial summaries per month or year.
• A filter allows to limit the view on the current week or month.

Reduction of dependencies

Kraft makes broad use of the core Qt5 libraries. The required KDE dependencies were reduced to a bare minimum. Akonadi libraries, which enable KDE PIM integration are now optional. The former dependency on heavyweight web browser components were completely removed and replaced by the far more simple richtext component of Qt.

These changes make it not only easier and more transparent to build Kraft but allow make a port to other platforms like MacOSX more easy in the future.

Under the Hood

A countless number of bugfixes and small improvements went in. Also updates to the newer C++ concepts where applicable make the rather mature code base more modern and better maintainable.

The Reportlab based PDF document creation script was updated and merged with a later version for example.

Deployment

Installing Kraft is still a bit complicated for unexperienced users, and distributions sometimes haven’t made a good job in the past to provide the latest version of Kraft.

To make it easier to test, there is an AppImage of Kraft 0.80 available that should be runable on most modern distributions. Just download a single file that can be started right away after having added the executable permissions.

Linux packages are already built for openSUSE (various versions) or Gentoo.

Kraft’s website will contain a lot more information.

There has been the big enterprise release 9.1 on September 20th, but that of course came along with community releases which are in the focus here.

We had server release 8.0.15, server release 8.1.10, server release 8.2.8 and release 9.0.5. There are maintenance releases for the older major versions, needed to fix bugs on installations that still run on these older versions. We deliver them following this plan.

The latest and greatest server release is release 9.1.1 that has all the hardening that also went into the enterprise releases.

Aside a ton of bugfixes that you find listed in the changelog there have also been interesting changes which drive innovation. To pick just one example: The data fingerprint property. It enables the clients to detect if the server got a backup restored, and saves changes on the clients to conflict files if needed. This is a nice example of solutions which are based on feedback from enterprise customers community running ownCloud, who help with reporting problems and proposing solutions.

Talking about professional usage of ownCloud: Of course also all the server release are available as linux packages for various distributions, for example the ownCloud server 9.1.1 packages. We think that our users should not be forced to deploy from tarballs, which is error prone and not native to Linux, but have the choice to use linux packages through the distributions package management.

There also have been client releases recently: The Android client versions 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 were released with important changes for Android 7 and much more fixes, as well as iOS client versions 3.5.0 and 3.5.1. The desktop client 2.2.4 also got a regular bug fix update (Changelog).

I guess you agree that is a lot of activity shown in the ownCloud project, making sure to get the best ownCloud experience out there for the users, driven by passion for the project and professional usage in focus.

If you are interested and want to join in and make ownCloud better, jump in on ownCloud Central or Github. It’s fun!

Overlay Icons

Overlay icons for the various file managers on our three platforms already exist for quite some time, but it has turned out that the performance was not up to the mark for big sync folders. The reason was mainly that too much communication between the file manager plugin and the client was happening. Once asked about the sync state of a single file, the client had to jump through quite some hoops in order to retrieve the required information. That involved not only database access to the sqlite-based sync journal, but also file system interaction to gather file information. Not a big deal if it’s only a few, but if the user syncs huge amounts, these efforts do sum up.

This becomes especially tricky for the propagation of changes upwards the file tree. Imagine there is a sync error happening in the foo/bar/baz/myfile. What should happen is that a warning icon appears on the icon for foo in the file manager, telling that within this directory, a problem exists. The complexity of the existing implementation was already high and adding this extra functionality would have reduced the reliability of the code lower than it already was.

Jocelyn was keen enough to do a refactoring of the underlying code which we call the SocketApi. Starting from the basic assumption that all files are in sync, and the code has just to care for these files that are new or changed, erroneous or ignored or similar, the amount of data to keep is very much reduced, which makes processing way faster.

Server Notifications

On the ownCloud server, there are situation where notifications are created which make the user aware of things that happened.

An example are federated shares:

If somebody shares a folder with you, you previously had to acknowledge it through the web interface. This explicit step is a safety net to avoid people sharing tons of Gigabytes of content, filling up your disk.

With 2.2.x, you can acknowledge the share right from the client, saving you the round trip to the web interface to check for new shares.

Keeping an Eye on Word & Friends

Microsoft Word and other office tools are rather hard to deal with in syncing, because they do very strict file locking of the files that are worked on. So strict that the subsequent sync app is not even allowed to open the file, not even for reading. That would be required to be able to sync the file.

As a result the sync client needs to wait until word unlocks the file, and then continue syncing.

For previous version of the client, this was hard to detect and worked only if other changes happened in the same directory where the file in question resides.

With 2.2.0 we added a special watcher that keeps an eye on the office docs Word and friends are blocking. And once the files are unlocked, the watcher starts a sync run to get the files to the server, or down from the server.

Advances on Desktop Sharing

The sharing has been further integrated and received several UX- and bugfixes. There is more feedback when performing actions so you know when your client is waiting for a response from the server. The client now also respect more data returned from the server if you have apps enabled on the server that for example limit the expiration date.

Further more we better respect the share permissions granted. This means that if somebody shared a folder without create permissions with you and you want to reshare this folder in the client you won’t get the option to share with delete permissions. This avoids errors when sharing and is more in line with how the whole ownCloud platform handles re-sharing. We also adjusted the behavior for federated reshares with the server.

Please note to take full advantage of all improvements you will need to run at least server version 9.0.

Have fun!

But not Volumio.

After quite some development time the project released RC1. While there were a few small bugs in a beta, my feelings about the RC1 are really positive. Volumio2 has a very nice and stylish GUI, a great improvement over Volumio1. Album-art is now nicely integrated in the playback pane and and everything is more shiny, even if the general concept is the same as in Volumio1.

I like it because it is only a music player. Very reduced on that, but also very thought through and focussed to fulfill that job perfectly. I just want to find and play music from my collection, quickly and comfortable and with good sound quality. No movies, series, images. Just sound.

About speed: While the scanning of my not too big music collection on a NAS was a bit of a time consuming task in the past, this feels now much faster (maybe thats only because of a faster network between the Raspberry and the NAS?). Searching, browsing and everything works quite fluid on an Raspberry2. And with the Hifiberry DAC for output, the sound quality is more than ok.

This is an release candidate of the first release of the rewritten project, and the quality is already very good. Nevertheless I found a few things that did not work for me or could be improved. That the volume control is not working is probably because of the Hifiberry DAC driver, I remember there was something, but haven’t investigated yet.

There are some things in the GUI that could be looked at again: For example on the Browse page, there is the very well working search field. After entering the search term and Enter, the search result is displayed as a list of songs to select from. I wished that the songs were additionally grouped by albums, which should also be selectable to be pushed to the play queue.

Also it would be great if the Queue would somehow indicate which entry is currently played. I could not spot that.

But these are only minor findings which can easily be addressed later after enhancement requests were posted :-)

I think Volumio2 is already a great success, even before it was released! You should not hesitate to try it if you love to listen to music!

Thanks for the hard work Volumio-Team!

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.

Here we’re talking about overlay icons which are displayed in the popular file managers on the supported desktop platforms. The overlay icons are little additional icons that stick on top of the normal file icons in the file manager, like the little green circles with the checkmark on the screenshot.

The overlays visualize the sync state of each file or directory: The most usual case that a file is in sync between server and client is shown as a green checkmark, all good, that is what you expect. Files in the process of syncing are marked with a blue spinning icon. Files which are excluded from syncing show a yellow exclamation mark icon. And errors are marked by a red sign.

What comes along simple and informative for the user requires quite some magic behind the curtain. I promise to write more about that in another blog post soon.

Selective Sync

Another new thing in 1.7.0 is the selective sync.

In ownCloud client it was always possible to have more than one sync connection. Using that, users do not have to sync their entire server data to one local directory as with many other sync solutions. A more fine granular approach is possible here with ownCloud.

For example, mp3’s from the Music dir on the ownCloud go to the media directory locally. Digital images which are downloaded from the camera to the “photos” dir on the laptop are synced through a second sync connection to the server photo directory. All the other stuff that appears to be on the server is not automatically synced to the laptop which keeps it organized and the laptop harddisk relaxed.

While this is of course still possible we added another level of organization to the syncing. Within existing sync connections now certain directories can be excluded and their data is not synced to the client device. This way big amounts of data can be easier organized depending on the demands of the target device.

To set this up, check out for the button Choose what to Sync on the Account page. It opens the little dialog to deselect directories from the server tree. Note that if you deselect a directory, it is removed locally, but not on the server.

What else?

There is way more we put into this release: A huge amount of bug fixes and detail improvements went in. Fixes for all parts of the application: Performance (such as database access improvements), GUI (such as detail improvements for the progress display), around the overall processing (like how network timeouts are handled) and the distribution of the applications (MacOSX installer and icons), just to name a few examples. Also a lot of effort went into the sync core where many nifty edge cases were analyzed and better handled.

Between version 1.6.2 and the 1.7.0 release more than 850 commits from 15 different authors were pushed into the git repository (1.6.3 and 1.6.4 were continued in the 1.6 branch which commits are also in the 1.7 branch). A big part of these are bug fixes.

Who is it?

Who does all this? Well, there are a couple of brave coders funded by the ownCloud company working on the client. And we do our share, but not everything. Also coding is only one thing. If you for example take some time and read around in the client github repo it becomes clear that there are so many people around who contribute: Reporting bugs, testing again and again, answering silly looking questions, proposing and discussing improvements and all that (yes, and finally coding too). That is really a huge block, honestly.

Even if it sometimes becomes a bit heated, because we can not do everything fast enough, that still is motivating. Because what does that mean? People care! For the idea, for the project, for the stuff we do. How cool is that? Thank you!

Have fun with 1.7.0!

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.

Apart from the wellknown features ownCloud 7 also brings some things that you do not see on the first look. Some of these things relate to syncing and as a guy working mainly on the sync client I am especially happy about that: Already with the current released clients you will see a performance win in syncing, because ownCloud 7 handles parallel HTTP requests way better. Moreover, ownCloud 7 sends some interesting information about it’s files, and the next generation of sync clients will for example know which files are shared and their permissions. We are currently working on some exciting stuff on the client side, stay tuned.

That all should be reason enough to celebrate together, because ownCloud is done by all of us in the community.

On Tuesday, august 5th, we will do a Release Party in Nuremberg, Germany. As last time, the Coworkingspace Nürnberg is hosting us. We will start at 18:00.

Everybody who is interested in ownCloud for whatever reason is very welcome to show up. We will probably have a short informal demonstration or two, but of course plenty room for questions, discussions, meet and greet with all kind of FOSS people, some core ownCloud people, nice beer and big fun.

You really should come! And don’t forget to tell your friends, thanks!

It was finished today and fixes two issues that came up after the release of the previous version: A compile fix for compiling Kraft against the latest version of ctemplate, which did not work out of the box with Kraft 0.54. The other fix is a fail in generating PDF documents which is a pretty severe problem for Kraft. Both is now working well with the new version 0.55 which can be downloaded here.

Thanks a lot to the Kraft community for testing!

If you find other problems, want to give feedback or seek help, please see here how to proceed. Thanks!

It is not only a maintenance release but also comes with a couple of new features, the most outstandig is the ability to handle a new document type, the delivery note which prints no prices. That closes a gap for interesting use cases. Here is a more detailed log of what was added to this release.

Kraft is KDE software to help people driving a small business. Emphasis is on small and business. We are not talking CMS, ERP or any other monster. Kraft is about a handy alternative for people who wrote their first 25 invoices using Libre Office and now start to think of how they could could be more efficient in doing that: Using structured templates, being able to create an invoice based on a quote that was done before, no need to fiddle around with slipping paragraphs, a proper address book, such stuff. Software for people who have other things to do than sit in front of their computer. Hard to understand for geeks like us who enjoy this technology, but yes, there are a lot of people who do not, who just use computers because they must, because they have a business.

I started to work on Kraft in 2006, and worked on similar software before, well, we all have our dark history. I always enjoyed doing software for people who would prefer to not use the computer. And the more I got involved into KDE the more obvious it became to me how perfectly KDE is able to help with that. High level classes, components to reuse, other projects aiming the same direction, and a community of helpful, friendly and open minded people. Also I think software like Kraft is a good addition to the KDE family as it has potential to bring more and different users to KDE.

However, if measured by the number of known users of Kraft, this idea failed completely. Compared to other KDE software, Kraft has disappointing little (known) users. Also contributors: Apart from very few brave developers who spent some time on Kraft, I am the only contributor. The reasons for that can be discussed in another thread.

What still keeps me motivated to work on Kraft is that the few users often tell how happy they are with it. And that Kraft really helps them to drive their business and save time. Also that they found with Linux and KDE a computer “environment” that really helps them reliably instead of facing them with scary stuff. That is really cool, and the best is that this recently happened more often than the years before.

That is what keeps me around with Kraft.

For the future, there are enough ideas: “Combined Kraft” which means using one instance of Kraft from distributed home offices, with ownCloud as sync hub, or an easy to use project management and of course a port to KDE Frameworks 5 to be able to ship for Mac and and and…

Well, it’s a pet project, and my day unfortunately does not leave very much energy behind for that currently, so don’t expect big movement, but be sure that there will be small steps.

The ownCloud community released ownCloud 6 a couple of days ago. That was another big release and we want to celebrate!

Please, everybody who is interested in ownCloud, like to learn more, give feedback or just want to meet other people from the community, you are invited to show up at Coworking Space in Nuremberg, Josephsplatz 8, on december 18th, 6pm.

We will have a relaxed evening with a little discussion, maybe short demos, cakes and stuff, and fun. No heavy talks and serious faces!

We are looking forward to meeting you.

You find suitable download links as usual at: http://owncloud.org/sync-clients/

Version 1.4.1 is a bugfix release for the 1.4.0 version released a few of weeks ago which brought a lot of new features. This one solves a couple of problems that were coming up during the last few weeks. For example, the problem that the client lost its configuration (at least) on the Win32 platform when the machine was shut down is fixed. Also a lot of redundant uploads wont happen any more. And there are even more fixes, as the detailed Changelog rules out.

We thank you for your ongoing support and the good work on bugs that came up. As usual we are looking forward to your feedback. Please work with us in the Github bugtracker if you experience issues.

This is a bugfix release which brings a handful of useful fixes against bugs which were reported by Kraft users since the last release.

In the catalog view, now drag and drop is working to sort templates. Removing of sub chapters is also working now. A bug in the unit handling was fixed that picked wrong units in some cases. The path to document templates is not utf8 save.

As a new feature the address of the own company now can be picked from Kraft’s settings dialog also after first setup routine.

A source tarball can be downloaded from the Sourceforge Project, binary packages are on the way. Please also report bugs on SF.

Thanks for your interest and contribution to Kraft. If you want to support Kraft, please give feedback, spread the word or buy cool stuff.

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.

It is good to see the positive feedback overall. That shows a couple of things from my engineering point of view: The concentrated work we continously do on all parts of ownCloud pays off. That is obvious of course, but still nice to see. And our (also obvious) actions to improve code quality such as the consequent use of continous integration, code reviews and such helps to improve quality.

“People are always excited if releases come with GUI changes!” I heard people saying. Well, maybe, but that’s not the whole truth. It also proves for me again is how important UI design and UX is. Me as a knee-deep-developer have an interesting relationship to all UX topics: I always have an opinion. Often a strong opinion. But the results coming out of that have not always been the, well, the most optimal. Very fortunate on the client we work together with our UX guy Jan and the positive feedback also shows how good that is for the software.

But enough of release pride. There is more work to do: The bug tracker is still not empty, the list of feature ideas is long. We will continue to focus on correctness, stability and robustness of syncing, performance and useful features and work on a version 1.5 for you.

These are a couple of concrete points we’re focussing on for 1.5:

1. we already merged the client code on the new upstream sync version in git.
2. performace improvements through further reduction of the number of requests and more efficiency in database operations on the client.
3. we are working on a new propagator component that allows us to do the changes mentioned in 2 more easily.
4. File manager integration, which means havingn icons in Explorer, Dolphin and friends.

A more detailed list can be found at github.

Thank you for all your help and support. It’s big fun!

We just release ownCloud Client 1.2.5, hurrah! It’s a small bug fix release, but it will make more people happy users! It fixes three ugly crashes we found with the help of encouraged bug hunters. One of them was an race between our thread which runs csync and the Qt SSL stack we’re obviously using. That caused a crash which happened after quite some run time, or also never… Hard to reproduce and debug, but finally Danimo and his mighty friends were able to nail that.

The new client can be found through it’s download page, here is the Changelog.

If you find issues, please help us to improve ownCloud by commenting or reporting the bugs on our bugtracker. Thanks!

What is interesting about the release from a more technical point of view? Here are a couple of examples.

One of the things which often was complained about was the performance of the client. Performance is a very broad term, so we have to examine the details: Many people felt like its a performance problem that former clients polled the local file system for changes on the MacOSX and Windows platform. That was recommended from other projects which have experience with going through large file collections. QFileSystemWatcher seemed not to be designed for this usecase.

Polling was ok for desktop computers with up-to-date hardware, but on devices running from batteries this was a energy drain. Good that we could fix that with 1.2.0 using native implementation of change detectors on Windows and MacOSX. They detect changes within a file system tree. If a change is detected, a sync run is started. But note, this is only for local file systems. Detection of changes on the server is a different story which has to be told as well.

Another performance problem was within the file upload which is done by a HTTP PUT request. Month ago (pretty after my start at ownCloud) I implemented it using a tmp file in between. That means, the source file was copied to a tmp file, and from that it was processed to the request body. Improvement was needed and we changed the code to directly read from the file descriptor of the opened source file.

Another thing that was improved with 1.2.0 is the error reporting to the user. Former versions of the client sometimes provided error messages which were not really accurately describing the problem. The reason for that was that csync uses errnos (yes, the ones from errno.h) to name errors as csync maps everything to a POSIX file interface. That surely works as long as you’re on a kind of file system. But it’s hard to map HTTP communication problems onto that. So we decided to add our own “custom” errnos and enhance the whole idea to use these to describe problems. That works more accurate now.

The next things on the list are for example a more convenient setup dialog for the client. Also we will get away from the kind of hard coded target file name on the cloud. A better network recognition will also be next as well as better handling of big files. And more…

Thanks a lot to all who helped to get 1.2.0 finished! It is big fun to work in such a great community :-)

The release of version 1.2.0 is planned for the next week if things go smooth.

[caption id=“attachment_219” align=“alignright” width=“595”] New Sync Protocol Dialog[/caption]

In particular, the the following improvements were added:

• Proxy authentication fixed (Basic auth, NTLM will not yet work)
• The status dialog now provides statistics on the last sync run (via the info button). It will tell in detail which files have been synced, added or deleted.
• Client will go offline while the server in in maintenance mode (feature available with ownCoud master only)
• Improved SSL Certificate acceptance
• All sizes of the new icons are available.
• Support files > 2 GB on all platforms for uploading.
• Fixed some minor memory leaks and again saved some server requests through optimizations.
• Improved error reporting to the user.
• Remove legacy theming support.

We would appreciate if you give this release a test ride. Note that because it is beta you should make extra sure to have have backups of your data.

If you want to give feedback, please use our mailing list for general discussion and the issue tracker for bug reports. Please read our new guidelines on bug reporting before!

Download Links:

• Windows, 32/64 Bit: http://download.owncloud.com/download/testing/owncloud-1.2.0beta2-setup.exe
• Mac OS X ( >= 10.6, 64 bit): http://download.owncloud.com/download/testing/ownCloud-1.2.0beta2.dmg
• Linux: http://software.opensuse.org/download/package?project=isv:ownCloud:testing&package=owncloud-client

Sources:

• Mirall: http://download.owncloud.com/download/testing/mirall-1.2.0beta2.tar.bz2
• OCSync: http://download.owncloud.com/download/testing/ocsync-0.70.1.tar.bz2

Have fun!

This is the first build with the new things we did in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, you will

• discover that there is much better error reporting if something goes wrong.
• probably feel like it syncs faster, yes faster.
• see that there are less HTTP requests to the server for a single sync run.
• don’t see any issues with MacOSX and funny characters in filenames any more.
• recognize a new icon set, which is not finalized yet (actually not all sizes are there, thats why the status dialog looks a bit funny) but we thought its nice to already add it to the beta. It should fit nicely into your operating system environment.
• realize that this client comes with a cross platform file system watcher on clientside, so no polling any more.
• have your password stored in a secure keychain on all platforms since we added qtkeychain to the client.

Maybe there is more, but we thought that’s already a nice beta release.

Please find packages for MacOSX, Windows and Linuxes. Note, not all packages are finished yet. If the one for your distro is missing, please come back later, or even better - speak up at packaging@owncloud.org and help fixing :)

Of course you also should note that this is an early beta and you would not want to use it without a good backup of your data and only on your test account without important data.

We would appreciate if you let us know your experience on the mailinglist. If you find problems, please report it to the client’s bugtracker mentioning client- and server versions and at best with useful logs.

With that we are happily vanishing to spend some time away from the computer, looking back on a very exciting and very busy year, working on an interesting topic with a lot of nice people.

Thanks and best Season’s Greetings!

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.

Apart from that, a lot of bug fixes and improvements happened, read more details on the Kraft Homepage.

Sources and binary packages for various Linux distributions are available from the Download Page or will appear there soon.

This release is nice progress for Kraft and I hope you have fun and success with the new release. Thanks all who contributed to Kraft! I am looking forward to getting your feedback!

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.

Version 1.0.2 is also the version that is released on all big desktop platforms the first time. Now we also offer a dmg for MacOSX as well as a Windows Installer and packages for the major Linux distributions. Have fun!

If you want to talk about ownCloud, file synchronization or such, we have a booth on Linuxtag in Berlin and I will be there. I am looking forward to meeting you.

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.

The whole start process of oCC, which is more complex as it might seem as libcsync expects a nice environment with a verified connection to the ownCloud, was cleaned and matured. I had to learn about QNAM but now we seem to be friends.

Efforts also went into the following areas:

• Error handling: People got confused about error messages from oCC which were not accurate here and than. I added more fine granular error reporting to libcsync so that oCC now can give even more helpful error messages.
• MacOSX: On the sprint weekend in Stuttgart, we made good progress on that platform, will also soon get a release. Domme got the most out of cmake to get dmg image building going, thanks, you rock!
• Qt 4.6: As usual one has to learn that current distributions ship not so current Qt versions. Thanks to Thomas, he put quite some effort in porting back to Qt 4.6 - so that Debians friends can also use oCC now.
• Packages: Check out the community repo on OBS: We now can provide packages for way more platforms including Ubuntu and Debian. Still your help would be appreciated in maintaining.

Speaking about the recent sprint in Stuttgart: It was great to be there, ownCloud has an open, friendly and welcoming community in which you really feel the spirit of working on something new and interesting with cool potential. I really enjoy being here,. Thanks guys for all your work and feedback :-)