Few weeks after the release of Firefox 3, we are happy to announce that the next version of eyeOS will feature full support for this browser, after solving some bugs in certain parts of the system that prevented eyeOS from showing well.

Some of these bugs were reported by users of our community in our Launchpad platform, and we want to thank them for helping us detecting and solving the bugs: thank you very much!

This maintenance version, eyeOS 1.6.0.3, will fully support Firefox 3, as well as fixing other bugs in the system, making this version more and more stable.

We must remember that we want to keep the eyeOS 1.6 version as solid and stable as possible, and we will be releasing a maintenance release about every month. Stay tuned to download this release soon!

We are happy to announce the first beta of Jaws 0.8.0 (What we do in life echoes in eternity) released. This is a release which 'should' work but NOT be used in production systems.

• jaws-core: Include core and core gadgets (useful if you want to use Jaws as a framework).
• jaws-blog-system: include same as jaws-core but also some gadgets like Banner, Blog, Chatbox, FileBrowser, etc..). Useful if you want to use Jaws as a blog system and a theme.
• jaws-complete: include everything

You can get these tarballs from our site.

Now, some notes about this version before you start using it:

1. Since this version ONLY users running 0.7.x can upgrade. Previous versions are officially unsupported.
2. Make a backup of your database, you are warned!

What's new in this version?

• Lot of enhancement and improvement stuff you will love
• Oracle and Interbase/Firebird supported
• New gadgets
• Many fixes and new code!

Enjoy this release and report your bugs.

As many of you noticied we forgot to include the Skeleton gadget in the jaws-complete tarball of 0.7.2. This issue caused some (fatal) errors with users who wanted to upgrade with the Skeleton gadget already installed.

We've uploaded the tarball again including the Skeleton gadget.

*NOTE: This is not a bug fix release, we are just uploading the jaws-complete tarball again with the Skeleton gadget*. There's no need to update again or use this tarball if you didn't have this problem.

After some weeks working to provide a good platform to every eyeOS developer, we are ready to announce the roadmap for the next eyeOS version: eyeOS 1.6.0.

eyeOS 1.6 will introduce both system and applications improvements, and will be the first eyeOS release ever to include also an optional add-on for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Synchronization with local files and folders (see blueprint)

eyeOS 1.6 does incorporate a new system (based on the xml-rpc protocol) which will allow external desktop applications to communicate with every eyeOS in the world through the port 80. With this new addition, the same day of eyeOS 1.6 release we will release eyeSync 1.0, a tool to automatically synchronize local files and folders with your eyeOS system.

By just selecting which folders do you want to keep synchronized, eyeOS will maintain it updated with your virtual eyeOS computer, asking you to resolve conflicts with files modified in both ways and keeping the folders always updated with your eyeOS without requiring any action from the user (the system does detect changes in the folders and sends them to eyeOS every time we save changes on a file or copy/remove files locally).

With eyeSync (that will ask you for the eyeOS server you’re working on, your username and password, and the path you want to sync with local folders), eyeOS will include a brand new functionality for the whole system: an online backup of all your data, which can be accessed (and many times also read and updated) from everywhere in the world with an Internet connection, through eyeOS.

eyeOS Mobile Access (see blueprint)

With the new eyeOS Mobile Access (accessible from every mobile phone with a WAP/Mobile HTML browser) you will be able to access your eyeOS files, download them to your mobile phone and upload new ones.

The new Mobile Access will provide a new cool feature for mobile phones: Office files viewing, through the existent eyeConverter to read Office and OpenOffice documents. This means that you will be able to see documents, spreadsheets and presentations from your mobile phone, without installing any new software into it.

Desktop Widgets (see blueprint)

The new eyeOS 1.6 desktop will include three default widgets activated: miniCalendar, miniMessages and miniHome, that will inform you what do you have planned for today (and optionally navigate to other dates with the included calendar), see new and last received messages in eyeMessages and see how much space do you have occupied in your account.

The new widgets will be controlled with a new Widgets Box app which will allow you to see which widgets are installed in the system, add new ones to your desktop and remove existent ones.

Improvements in Calendar and Contacts (see blueprint)

As we did with eyeOS 1.5 and Office, eyeOS 1.6 will include hot improvements for eyeCalendar and eyeContacts, making easier to share information between users using this applications, providing more usability and options.

With the improvements and the XML-RPC system, we can expect for next versions sync tools between the most used desktop apps for calendar and contacts (Microsoft Outlook, Novell Evolution, Mozilla Thunderbird…) and eyeOS PIM tools (eyeCalendar and eyeContacts).

Integrated add-ons from eyeOS-Apps website

eyeOS 1.6 will integrate some cool add-ons (from themes to apps and games) from the eyeOS-Apps community.

For example, the new version will come with the Light Desktop theme, the eyeTetravex game -being the second official game in eyeOS-, eyeXMLViewer and some more.

Improvements in eyeSheets

The Save function in eyeSheets was removed in the eyeOS 1.5 release. Hard work has been done from then, creating a new library which is being used in many projects now, with the collaboration of an eyeOS community member (Juan Lao Tebar). This library (php-ods in Sourceforge) will be used to provide the save functionality in eyeSheets.

Improvements suggested by the community

After the release of eyeOS 1.5, Alexandre Mejat (an eyeOS community member) started a topic in the forums called Suggestions for eyeOS 1.6. While lots of the ideas that appeared there do need some hard work on the system, we have read all the ideas and some of them will be included in eyeOS 1.6.

This ideas include improvements in the themes system (allowing the customization for the four borders in the windows or allowing themes to auto-run applications in the user’s desktop when activated or deactivated, for example).

Note that this kind of topics should be now posted in the new Development Community, specially in the Blueprints pages for registering projects and ideas around eyeOS, which will make much easier to find developers for each idea and get it implemented in the next eyeOS versions.

Optimizing the downloaded data

A new effort on minimizing the amount of data which is sent to the user’s browser on the eyeOS login is being done. eyeOS 1.6 will come with optimized JS libraries and CSS files.

The goal will be to save a 30% of the sent data.

Summary and dates

The new eyeOS 1.6 release will come during April. You can expect the eyeOS 1.6 Beta on an online server to test it (specially the new mobile and sync platforms) by April 15th.

We have noticed the Developers Community it’s starting to rise. We would like every eyeOS developer or user interested in the eyeOS development to join the project’s Mailing Lists to make everything easier to coordinate.

The new ideas have been also added to the eyeOS Launchpad page for Blueprints (ideas and projects). You can follow their continued development from there.

Once again, thanks to the whole community which does help to improve eyeOS day after day.

We are proud to announce the second official eyeOS theme, available at the eyeOS Applications Community: The eyeOS Light Desktop.

The Light Desktop theme is a lightweight theme that removes the effects-based menus and adds a new left bar on the desktop (that can be easily edited) with the favorite apps and places, with a new menu that shows all the applications.

It will come bundled with eyeOS 1.6 as an optional theme (the default one will be the current one with some improvements).

If you have an eyeOS server, you can download and install this theme easily, following the instructions at the theme’s download page. You can also take a look at the other great eyeOS Themes available there.

If you use the eyeOS Public Server or any other public server that has this theme installed, you can follow this instructions to enable the Light Desktop:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Go to Autorun Commands and click on New.
3. Write eyeLightDesk (note that it’s case sensitive!) and click on Add.
4. Go to Theme and select Light Desktop.
5. Close your session and log in. That’s all!

If you want your desktop to load faster, you can remove eyeDock and eyeDesk_extras from your Autorun Commands. Just re-add them when you want to switch to the default theme again.

If you are having problems enabling this theme, you can check the common problems and solutions at them theme download page.

We would love to know where are you using eyeOS, and which apps do you use on the system, to prepare the next releases acording to eyeOS main uses. Please take 20 seconds to answer this two polls:

 

 

We will be adding a new poll to resume the main whishes and blueprints for eyeOS 1.6 (add yours at this Forums’ topic) so the Roadmap of eyeOS 1.6 will be built with the most voted ideas.

Thanks!

We would love to know where are you using eyeOS, and which apps do you use on the system, to prepare the next releases acording to eyeOS main uses. Please take 20 seconds to answer this two polls:

 

 

We will be adding a new poll to resume the main whishes and blueprints for eyeOS 1.6 (add yours at this Forums’ topic) so the Roadmap of eyeOS 1.6 will be built with the most voted ideas.

Thanks!

We are very happy to announce the first stable version of Jaws 0.7.0 which should now work on production systems.

And as you know, the next stable (bug fixes) versions will be numbered under 0.7.x (ie 0.7.1, 0.7.2... etc). If you want to use the svn 0.7.x versions we suggest you to use the one located at:

svn://dev.jaws-project.com/svn/jaws/branches/0.7

What is new in Jaws 0.7.0?

---

• Language support for: Romanian, Arabic, Catalá, Dansk, Farsi, Deutsch, Japanese, Polski, Italiano, Simplified Chinese and of course English and Spanish!
• DB support for: MySQL(i), PostgreSQL, MSSQL and SQLite!
• All gadgets are completely ajaxed!
• Better antispam support: Captchas (simple and mathematician), Akismet and extra tools!
• Better urls and now we let you define your own route maps so you can access your posts via index.php/blog/show/123 or index.php/posts/123, you can define it!
• Almost everything works!

We invite you to fall in love with this version as we are now!

Requirements

---

• PHP >= 4.3.6
• MySQL >= 3.23.49 (if you use MySQL)
• Apache 1.3, Apache 2, Cherokee >> 0.4.29 (under fcgi) and IIS

Download

---

To download the package(s) just click here!.

Thanks for all of you who reported bugs and keep helping this nice project!

As many of you noticied we forgot to include the Skeleton gadget in the jaws-complete tarball of 0.7.2. This issue caused some (fatal) errors with users who wanted to upgrade with the Skeleton gadget already installed.

We've uploaded the tarball again including the Skeleton gadget.

*NOTE: This is not a bug fix release, we are just uploading the jaws-complete tarball again with the Skeleton gadget*. There's no need to update again or use this tarball if you didn't have this problem.

We are very happy to announce the first stable version of Jaws 0.7.0 which should now work on production systems.

And as you know, the next stable (bug fixes) versions will be numbered under 0.7.x (ie 0.7.1, 0.7.2... etc). If you want to use the svn 0.7.x versions we suggest you to use the one located at:

svn://dev.jaws-project.com/svn/jaws/branches/0.7

What is new in Jaws 0.7.0?

---

• Language support for: Romanian, Arabic, Catalá, Dansk, Farsi, Deutsch, Japanese, Polski, Italiano, Simplified Chinese and of course English and Spanish!
• DB support for: MySQL(i), PostgreSQL, MSSQL and SQLite!
• All gadgets are completely ajaxed!
• Better antispam support: Captchas (simple and mathematician), Akismet and extra tools!
• Better urls and now we let you define your own route maps so you can access your posts via index.php/blog/show/123 or index.php/posts/123, you can define it!
• Almost everything works!

We invite you to fall in love with this version as we are now!

Requirements

---

• PHP >= 4.3.6
• MySQL >= 3.23.49 (if you use MySQL)
• Apache 1.3, Apache 2, Cherokee >> 0.4.29 (under fcgi) and IIS

Download

---

To download the package(s) just click here!.

Thanks for all of you who reported bugs and keep helping this nice project!

As many of you noticied we forgot to include the Skeleton gadget in the jaws-complete tarball of 0.7.2. This issue caused some (fatal) errors with users who wanted to upgrade with the Skeleton gadget already installed.

We've uploaded the tarball again including the Skeleton gadget.

*NOTE: This is not a bug fix release, we are just uploading the jaws-complete tarball again with the Skeleton gadget*. There's no need to update again or use this tarball if you didn't have this problem.

Happy 2008 everyone! It’s a new year, and what better way to kick it off by releasing the long awaited Pigg Beta 9.9.0
I’ll leave the technical stuff to the change log but I’m sure you will agree this is the best version of Pligg yet. Besides a slew of core improvements and a multitude of bug fixes, the first thing you will notice is a slight change to the installation process. We are rolling out a language fetching feature to the installation process. This will allow you to select a language, then the installer will connect to the Pligg servers to download the most up to date language pack.

Another new addition is Template Management. This will allow you to download and install templates instantly. You can also repackage templates for distribution much easier.

Some other great features included in this version are the addition of the Akismet anti-spam, and new Captcha module for registrations which allows for different types of Captcha methods to be used. Agree-to-Terms allows you to set up a user agreement upon registration.

We would like to thank everyone that made 2007 a great year for Pligg and we promise that 2008 will be the best year yet!

Some people has been asking us, since we started this project, why we didn’t simply ported OpenOffice to eyeOS. The answer was quite simple, OpenOffice was a Desktop application, and eyeOS was a Web System. While technicaly possible, porting such a huge java application to the web would never be fast on lots of computers, and much less in some Internet-Capable gadgets, and it would be running (partially) on the client, so was not an option for eyeOS.

The fact is that we have been working on making possible to join the power of OpenOffice and the velocity of Web Based applications, and we can finally make this exciting announcement: eyeOS 1.3 will be the first Open Source Web Solution to provide, without any needed plug-in installed in the client’s browser (such as Java or Flash), support for more than 100 different formats to view and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

The new eyeOS version will include support to read and write Microsoft Office and OpenOffice default formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .odt, .ods and .odp) trought the new eyeSheets and eyePresentations applications, and the current eyeDocs application.

But not just that. If you receive an Ichitaro 10 document, an Staroffice 8, a WordPerfect 4.2 or a MultiMate Adv. II 3.7 document, do not worry. Just upload it to your eyeOS, and feel free to open and edit it (for documents and spreadsheets) or to watch it (for presentations). Of course, you won’t have problems either to use the very recent formats (such as the new Microsoft Office Vista formats).

 This will be possible thanks to some hard work on the great OpenOffice platform, that will provide, in the server where eyeOS is installed, conversions between lots of formats to the eyeOS native ones trought some macros that will connect eyeOS with OpenOffice framework.

Once the server is prepared, everybody in the eyeOS server will be able to use and work with office documents, without needing to install OpenOffice, Microsoft Office or any other.

This is, seeing your last presentation or working with your spreadsheet in your Nintendo Wii ;-).

We are proud to announce that eyeOS 1.2 has just been released!

It’s not just a necessary update on eyeOS 1.x., but also a bunch of new features and applications needed by eyeOS to be really useful for the every day use. Need to send a mail? Well, just open eyeMail. Did your friend send a Microsoft Word file? No problem, eyeOS will open it and allow you to modify it. Want to have multiple groups for family and friends to share information between them? eyeControl 1.2 will let you do that and much more, visually.

And much more:

Microsoft Word (.doc) compatibility
By just uploading a MS Word file and clicking on it, eyeVisor will pop up and show you the document. You can edit it by clicking on the Edit button, and saving it back when you’re ready. That simple.

 

Send me a mail!
Since you can add as many accounts as you want in your eyeOS Mail Client, you can have, from everywhere and in a single place, access to all your mails accounts.

 

Multiple File Upload
While the big improvement in MFU has been delayed until 1.2.1, eyeOS 1.2 includes real multiple upload, Gmail style, that will allow you to choose all the files you want to upload to your eyeOS account.

 

Design improvements here and there
The desktop bar, the eyeDock icons and the application icons are just few examples of the design improvements in eyeOS 1.2. That would have been impossible without Marc, the eyeOS designer (No, he’s not leaving eyeOS to work for anyone else .

 

A real and powerful Control Center
eyeControl 1.2 (mainly developed by Lars Knickrehm) features lots of options to customize your desktop (if you’re a normal user) or to full administrate your server (if you’re the administrator), allowing you to create and remove groups and users, customizing the eyeSoft repositories, activating / deactivating user creation and much more.

 

Full FTP client, done 100% with the eyeOS Toolkit
The new eyeFTP (developed by Anaël Ollier) allows you to browse public and private FTP servers, and the most important, inter-actuate with them. Upload and download files from the FTP server to your eyeOS server or to your computer, even if your actual connection does not allow access to the FTP port: all you’re doing is moving trough your eyeOS system, and is the server which is handling the FTP connection.

 

Customize your Dock
Finally! Create new groups and move applications between them, and add the applications you have downloaded from eyeSoft/Packages Center to your dock. Everything from the new Applications Manager.

 

Not just videos. Also Movies.
The new eyeMovies features the latest codec support for being able to view big video files encoded as DivX from your eyeOS system. Just upload your movie and launch it, and eyeOS will do the rest.

 

Compress and uncompress.
The new eyeArchive, which opens automatically when you click a Zip file allows you to uncompress your zip files and create new ones from folders and files.

 

How many space did you said I have?
With eyeOS 1.2 and its new quotas system, you can control how many space do your users have on your server. Users will be able to check their used space from eyeControl, and the admin will be able to have full control over the used space of the eyeOS installation.

 

Automatic Thumbnails!
If your server does have the GD library installed and enabled you’ll see thumbnails of your images instead of the classic image icon.

 

Developers, developers, developers!
New widgets are included (Toolbar,Tree, Progressbar…) as well as new libraries to communicate with outside eyeOS. The eyeOS API is finally marked as stable in eyeOS 1.2.0.

---

 

And what’s next?
While eyeOS 1.2 represents a great step on the eyeOS everyday usage, there is still a long road to go. Stay tuned for the official roadmap for eyeOS 1.3, planned for December 27th, during the next days, and the small updates on the 1.2.x!Thanks a lot for the continued support, testing and programming for this new release. Lars, Anaël, Vilu, and all of you who have been connected into the SVN development: Thanks.

Download eyeOS 1.2.0!
As usually, you can download the new version Installer and Updater from the Downloads Page. Documentation and translation tables will be updated soon!

I’m thrilled to announce that Version 2.3 “Dexter” of WordPress is now ready for the world. This release includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more. This release is named for the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

The entire team is really proud of this release, and I’m happy that this is our second on-time release under our new development schedule. The grand experiment of a more agile WordPress with significant features in the hands of users more often is working. I could write a blog post about each new feature, but I’ll try to be brief:

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your posts, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you whats the latest and greatest you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

You’ll notice that two of those features are straight out of the most-voted for ideas list. That’s just the user facing stuff, if you’re a developer you’ll be interested in:

1. Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
2. We’re using the new jQuery which is “800% faster.”
3. Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
4. The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
5. Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
6. The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
7. Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

You can view the Codex for more information about the release and some screenshots. And of course the place to download is always the same. Before you upgrade you may want to check out our Preparing for 2.3 post and the list of compatible plugins on the Codex.

A number of people are hosting upgrade parties around the world, including myself in San Francisco. If you are let me know and I’ll promote it on my blog.