In the middle of September I have been at the Nextcloud conference and took the opportunity to join a workshop on Android dev (I still utterly dislike Android, but that is a different topic). Back in the day I already tried and had troubles setting up Android Studio, so why not trying to get it running while the Pros are around.

Turned out it simply worked after installation. But the next challenge was to make my local Nextcloud dev server at https://cloud.example.com available from within the Android emulator to the Nextcloud app.

(Sorry, this one is a bit of a longer post. Perhaps goes best with a cup of coffee or a bottle of Club Mate ;) )

Nextcloud can be run in combination with different software stacks, starting with the PHP runtime, to web servers, databases, memcache servers (or without), file storages and so on.

In software with plugin capabilities, typically in interpreted languages, it is possible that plugin have dependencies included, that may collide with dependencies included in core product, or in other plugins. It is not a problem when the same version is used, but in turns into a problem when different versions that are incompatible to each other are shipped. The end user may face bugs. Developers speak of the Dependency Hell.

In Nextcloud these plugins are the various apps, coming from various sources.

Example:

For a long time it is already possible to leave comments on files. With Nextcloud 11 we provide a way to mention users in comments, so that a notification is created for the respective individual. This was never really advertised, however, because it was lacking an auto-completion tool that offers you a type-ahead selection of users. The crucial point is that user IDs are neither known to the end user nor exposed to them. For instance, if users are provided by LDAP, it might look like "1d5566a5-87e6-4451-bd2f-e0e6ba5944d9". Nobody wants to see this and the average person also will not memorize it :)

It would be sad to see the functionality rot away being unseen in a dark corner. With Nextcloud 13 the time was ripe to finally include this missing bit, which is actually pretty fundamental and every application that allows text based communication amongst multiple people ships it.

I am happy to announce the availability of Bookmarks for Nextcloud 0.10.0! Bookmarks is a simple way to manage the remarkable websites and pages you come across on the Internet. Bookmarks 0.10.0 provides API methods to create, read, update and delete your bookmarks as well as compatibility with upcoming Nextcloud 12, next to smaller improvements and fixes.

Bookmarks 0.10 is available at the Nextcloud App Store and thus of course from your Nextcloud app management. Since this release Bookmarks is not officially supporting ownCloud anymore.

I am going to the Nextcloud Conference in Berlin at TU Berin, from September 16th to 22nd. We have found exciting keynote speakers for our event: Karen Sandlerand Jane Silber. On Friday we are focused on the usage of Nextcloud within an enterprise environment, while on Saturday and Sunday we will have mostly lightning talks and workshops after the keynotes. The following days are dedicated to hackathons and ad-hoc meetings.

If you like to meet me or any of the other contributors, you know where to find us! If you like to join please register, so our Dear Jos can organize enough food and drinks so that nobody needs to starve or becomes parched.