ownCloud

This week, I worked on creating interfact mockups for my ownCloud camera backup app for Firefox OS. To make these mock-ups, I used Pencil, an open-source tool for GUI prototyping that has builds available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. (I actually ... [More] installed it as a Firefox extension.) Pencil was suggested to me by several different ownCloud contributors, and I've been very pleased with it so far. The drag-and-drop editor is quite intuitive. The only frustrating part of the application is the clipart browser, which crashes Firefox repeatedly and doesn't allow image resizing. Thankfully, copying and pasting images works seamlessly. I quickly found that I was prone to an unnecessary perfectionism when it came to making low-resolution mock-ups. As a detail-oriented person, it was difficult to me to let go of the idea of aesthetic cohesion and focus on blocking out the largest, most prominent elements of the design. A few people suggested I might benefit from using "sketchy" UI elements, like this set (included with Pencil), to help offset the unneccesary level of detail I was tempted to include in the first set of mock-ups. I'm sure this is elementary to many designers — Balsamiq's mockup tools include similar elements, and I've discovered that many designers purposefully use Comic Sans for their lorem ipsum text — but actively lo-fi aesthetics were a new concept to me. I've posted thumbnails of my current mockups (as of July 13) below, but feel free to click through to the full GitHub issue if you'd like to see older or newer versions or offer critique. (Many thanks to Jan, Alessandro, Joshua, and Mike for helping me demystify the prototyping process.) [Less]

In case you might have missed it, our customer at Sync and Share NRW, Dr. Raimund Vogl, has written a blog about how he and his organization chose ownCloud for 500,000 sync and share users: Building an Inter-University Private Cloud with Open Source ownCloud, on Linux.com.

ownCloud 7 is coming and in this series of articles I provide a preview of some of the most awesome features! It is the turn of the Documents app today.Documents showing Introducing Documents The documents app was introduced in ownCloud 6 and brought ... [More] collaborative editing of Open Document Format documents to ownCloud. Multiple users could simultaneously open a single document and work on it, seeing each others avatars and even mouse cursors, identified by colors. This technology, based on WebODF by KO GmbH brings editing more powerful and flexible than the rather well known Etherpad and clones, but without any additional dependencies or server requirements! And thrown in the box you get the powerful ownCloud features like versioning, local syncing, encryption, undelete and so on. More and better That is unique and special. No longer do you have to set up and maintain (and regularly restart) a Etherpad server. No longer do you have to limit your collaboration to basic text – while WebODF isn’t yet as powerful as local editing, it can open and work with real documents. New in ownCloud 7 is the seamless support for Microsoft Word documents by way of transparent conversion of file formats. Upon opening a Microsoft document for online editing, ownCloud can transparently convert the file, allow you to edit, and convert it back when you close it again. Changes are then synced to wherever the file was – desktop, laptop or with server to server sharing, another ownCloud instance. [Less]

Raimund Vogl, director of IT at Münster University explains why the public universities in the German state of Northrhine-Westfalia need their own private cloud and why only open source would do.

ownCloud has given observers much to discuss as file sharing is quickly becoming a leading tech market idea

Lexington, MA – July 9, 2014 – ownCloud, Inc., the company behind the world’s most popular open source file sync and share software, today announced that it had been named to Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant for the extremely competitive Enterprise File Sync and Share market.

Just thought I’d mimic Red Hat’s blog this morning: “Find out how ownCloud with Red Hat Storage Server on HP ProLiant SL4540 servers provides a scalable high-performance solution that lets users collaborate effectively while allowing IT staff to stay in control of the data.”

ownCloud 7 Community Edition is coming next week and we’re featuring some of its awesomeness in a series of sneak peeks. The last two were about sharing so I thought I’d cover ownCloud 7′s better performance and improvements in the user interface. ... [More] Better performance Performance matters and ownCloud 7 has made serious strides in this department. All ownCloud web pages will render and load faster thanks to new static css and javascript files. And various apps use ‘lazy loading’, which loads files as you scroll down the page instead of loading them all at once, making you wait for the server and client to exchange data. Now, even with thousands of items to show, pages load quickly. It isn’t just the web interface that has been made faster. Underlying storage and syncing has been sped up, too. And the ownCloud sync client now syncs faster, especially on many and large files, by parallel uploading and downloading changes. Last but not least, the upgrade/migration script is far faster than it is in ownCloud 6. New in this area is the addition of some scripts an admin can execute to migrate from one database to another, like going from SQLite to MySQL. Easier to use Of course, speed is just one aspect of the user experience. Making things easy and work well in more situations is another where ownCloud 7 shines! A good example is the support for mobile browsers. ownCloud now works great on most tablets and mobile devices, providing support for devices which don’t have a native app (like Microsoft and Blackberry OS devices), as well as providing another way of accessing your files. Talking about files: the Files app can now sort your files! By sorting by name, size or last modified time it is far easier to find the file you were looking for. But usability can also help with security. Our new Password Strength Indicator helps you pick stronger, more secure passwords! Last but not least I would like to mention the work that was done on the Activity app. Not only has it gone through a redesign to be cleaner and use space more efficiently, you can now receive notifications when files or folders are shared with you or when files in a shared folder are created, changed and deleted. You can get these modifications by mail. And for those users who have not yet set up the mail functionality in ownCloud: there is a new, easy to use wizard for configuring your mail settings. A good user experience is crucial for ownCloud. If we want to empower people to take back their data, our tool has to be easy to use and feel great. ownCloud 7 takes a huge step in the right direction and we’re grateful for all the contributors and the hard work they have put in to make this possible! [Less]