What you can do with ownCloud today

In the last couple of weeks work on ownCloud has really started to pick up. There are some amazing new features and people coming to ownCloud and I can't wait to see the fruits of their labors. Today, though, I'm going to talk about things that are already done and ready to be used today. I'm going to start with just the basics today but hopefully this will be a series I'll add to as new features are completed. Todays topic is:

File storage
This is the basic feature without which ownCloud isn't particularly useful. Luckily, it's also the feature that works best and has had the most testing. Here's a screenshot of the web interface, which is the first method most people will use to add files. Notice the upload and new folder buttons.

Once you have some files there you'll probably want to able to get to them without having to go through the web interface, maybe on multiple platforms.

Access from dolphin

Access from Finder on OS X

Once you can access them you might want to do more with them.

Make the desktop point to owncloud

These things also work on Windows, I just didn't have a computer here to take screenshots with. Hopefully this will give you an idea of some of the things that are possible. I hope I never have to email myself another file again.

Again, everything I've shown here is done and works as advertised. There might be a few bugs left to be squashed but that's what bugs.kde.org is for. If you find them, please report them. Also, please start using ownCloud. There are some amazing features in the pipeline but we need more users and developers to make sure they all get completed. I'll leave you with a final screenshot of a feature that still needs a lot of work.

P.S. If you're going to try ownCloud, please install from git. Master is very stable and easy to install. The owncloud wiki has lots of info on how to get it. Also, the number of people in #owncloud on freenode is growing quickly and it's a great place to get some help.

Easier configuration and working databases

Maybe it's just because ownCloud is a new project so there are a lot of basic tasks that still need to be done, but every morning I wake up and there have been some pretty major changes made during the night.

This morning I found a preliminary configuration dialog, much better than setting it by hand, as well as instructions on how to create the databases necessary so now my log is working!

Obligatory screenshot of the configuration dialog:

Here's another shot of the log. At first I thought it only logged when people signed in and out but then downloaded a file and that showed up, too. I think the existence of a read event in the log implies that a write event is coming (or is already there and I haven't found it yet).

For my next entry I think I'll make a screenshot tour of installing ownCloud from scratch. Now that it has a configuration dialog it's a lot easier to get it running. Plus, even if it is still in beta it's already becoming incredibly useful for me. Access to an arbitrary set of files from anywhere changes how I do things. If I know I'm going to want to show somebody something there's almost always a computer handy and this is much more convenient than thumb drives or searching google for that link I like. I'm sure it'll only get easier when sharing is implemented directly within ownCloud.

Until next time!

P.S. Maybe this is getting old but it's always useful for me to see when reading about non-final code: No matter how polished it looks, it's still in beta and, by definition, not ready for production use. As soon as it is ready, I'll be the first to let you know :-)