When working on the Nextcloud server and apps it is quite useful to run separate version branches besides each other. Until now I had cloned the server repository to separate folders, making it hard to share a commit between two major branches, since it always required a push to a remote first. Today I stumbled upon a git command that makes this fairly easy.

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The Google Summer of Code is almost over and I want to give you a quick update on what has been done in the last months.

You can have a look on how the integration of the Nextcloud client looks like in Nautilus in the following video. As GNOME will drop the support for status icons on the near future this will be the way for sync clients to give the user a way to access their functionally in the context of the synced folder.

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One week ago attended this years GUADEC (Gnome User And Developer European Conference) taking place at the MMU Birley Fields Campus in Manchester, UK.

Unfortunately I could not attend the first half of Day 1 so I missed some nice talks, but I just arrived in time to present my work on the cloud provider API for the Google Summer of Code at the Interns lightning talks. You can find my slides here. It was really amazing to hear about all the other interesting project going on and also meeting people to talk about the stuff they were doing. I also got a lot of positive feedback on my own GSoC project which was really motivating to me.

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A quick update of the account registration feature for the Nextcloud client I am currently working on during my GSoC project. In case providers offer an endpoint for account registration, users can just click the button and fill out a form as you can see in the video below.

The registration app will include a basic PoC implementation of the registration API. Since most hosting providers will likely have separate instances for each client they will need to implement that API to integrate it with their own deployment/order systems. Any feedback from providers is welcome at this stage of the project, so we can make sure there is nothing important missing.

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A quick update on my work for GNOME during GSoC. The initial work from Carlos has been split into a library handling the cloud provider management called libcloudproviders and a patch for GTK+ to add cloud providers to the GtkPlacesSidebar.

I did quite some refactoring of the code. One big change is that is now uses native DBus signals to react to changes of the cloud providers. That way each provider can notify individually about changes. It is now also possible for cloud providers to expose multiple synced directories (e.g. if a user has set up more that one accounts) to the API.

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So some time has passed since the coding period started and I want to give you a quick update on how things are going so far.

I started working on the improved setup experience of the Nextcloud client, by adding a list of providers that offer hosted Nextcloud installations for their customers. As a second step support for a registration API will be integrated so that users can create an account right from within the setup wizard. A proof of concept implementation for that API is almost ready for the [Nextcloud registration app][3].

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During this summer I’ll take part in the Google Summer of Code, working together with GNOME and Nextcloud to improve the out of the box cloud experience on the Linux desktop.

The integration of Nextcloud services within the GNOME desktop environment is already quite good, as gnome-online-services provides file browsing as well as calendar/contact/task sync with existing GNOME apps. Nevertheless the integration of the Nextcloud desktop client for file synchronization still has lot of room for improvement. Especially the initial setup of file synchronization is a high barrier for non-technical users.

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I started this blog mainly to keep track of the work done during google summer of code, but let’s see how things evolve – there might be coming some more.