We are proud to announce the first preview of eyeOS 1.8, which includes some new great freatures, bug fixes and is another step to get eyeOS closer to the end user, making it feeling more comfortable with eyeOS. As usual, the preview is released to find and solve the maximum number of bugs possible. This is why we would like to ask everyone to test the new release online or downloading it before the final release and report all the bugs seen to the eyeOS bugs page at launchpad. You can read here instructions about how to report bugs in eyeOS.

What’s new in eyeOS 1.8 Lars?

eyeFiles rewritten from scratch: The new eyeFiles now supports three different views and it’s possible to explore the home, group folders and trash from one single application. Administrators are also able to explore the directories of the registered users and the real filesystem.

eyeHelp: The eyeOS integrated help system: Daniel Sousa finished his work at eyeHelp and introduced some help topics. We need you to create new help topics! Please contact Daniel Sousa if you would like to participate. With the new eyeHelp, users will be able to check how to use the applications from the application itself, inside eyeOS.

New file management utilities: The utilities to manage files (create new files or folders, upload files, delete them, …) have been improved a lot. In most cases they now have additional features than before. eyeOpen (as an example) shows you a list with installed applications to open your files with.

A new theme (eyeFusion) has been added to eyeOS. Now eyeOS comes with 3 default themes (default, Light Desktop and eyeFusion).

Many default apps have been updated to new versions: eyeFTP reaches 3.2.0, eyeContacts has a new default design, eyeControl is now fully usable under Internet Explorer, eyeNav can hide its left bar, eyeMp3 has been fixed to work smoothly under different types of mp3 files, and almost all the available applications can be maximized and full-screened now.

You can find a more detailed list with new features in the release notes.

Download it!

You can download now eyeOS 1.8.0 Preview. Remember that the preview releases are thought to discover new bugs and solve them before the final release. For this reason, please do not use any preview version for production use. We will not provide an updater from the preview releases to the final version 1.8!

Download eyeOS 1.8 in ZIP format

Download eyeOS 1.8 in TAR.GZ format

Online testing…

If you do not want to install this preview at your own server, please test it at preview.eyeos.info. Please note that you must create a new account on that server. The preview server will be removed right after eyeOS 1.8 is released. So please do not save any important data at it! NOTE: The server will be updated to the revision we used for the packages soon!

Reporting bugs

Please report all bugs you notice. Reporting bugs is easy and will help us to release eyeOS 1.8 free of that annoying bug you and only you will see in the preview version.

You can find more information about how to report a bug in the release notes. Enjoy the new version!

Some time ago we were talking about the importance of a good system that would allow eyeOS to communicate with external platforms with a good API for the programmer. We finally released it inside eyeOS 1.6.0.

The first technology using it was eyeSync, the application that allows anyone to synchronize files and folders transparently from the local Operating System (there is an eyeSync version for Windows, Mac and Linux) to a specific folder of an eyeOS server.

But there are several possibilities that can be developed using the eyeOS’ XML-RPC system.

Our today’s example is a Widget for MacOSX that reads and allows you to send messages to eyeBoard of your eyeOS system (by default, the Public Server one) directly from the Dashboard:

With this tiny - but useful! - example we would like to encourage the developers from the eyeOS Development Community to create new local applications communicating with eyeOS through its XML-RPC system. Fall in love with it!

Releases

This week we released eyeOS 1.7.0.0 “Lars” with several bug fixes and new features. We got really many comments about that version. All in all everyone I talked to, like this version, but some changes introduced new problems.

So we cannot stop working now: The next versions will be eyeOS 1.7.0.1, which fixes all bugs you and we noticed. eyeOS 1.6.0.4 will be continued as our most stable branch for a while. All fixed things between eyeOS 1.6.0.3 and 1.7.0.1 will be in eyeOS 1.6.0.4!

Both versions will be released on the next Friday. It is the 10th of October 2008.

Development

New developers are welcome! eyeOS 1.7.1 is planned to be released in one month and if you want to integrate your work into eyeOS, please create a new blueprint at Launchpad and we will answer you.

Beside: We use the Launchpad service to manage our bugs and blueprints. Blueprints are simple descriptions of an idea. They are listed at blueprints.launchpad.net/eyeos. We created a document about “How To Report a bug on Launchpad”. You download it from here.

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of eyeOS 1.7 “Lars” Preview, which is the result of months of work from the eyeOS Team and eyeOS Community on both the eyeOS Platform and Base applications.

You can find more information about this release in its “Release Notes“.

Release Notes

This version introduces our new “Release Notes”, which shows you all information about the current release. Please read them before installing eyeOS!

eyeOS 1.7 Preview Release Notes

Testers wanted!

There are still five days before the final release, and some testing would be really appreciated. Now it is the best moment to report bugs.

Test it online!

We provide a public server for this version. It will be removed after the final version has been released. Please use it only for testing eyeOS 1.7.0.0: http://preview.eyeos.info/

Download it!

ZIP file: download it here

TAR.GZ file: download it here

• What will be the next version? - eyeOS 1.7 or eyeOS 2.0?
• When will the next version be released?
• What features are coming next?

Many users asked us such questions. At the forums, via Email, via IRC, via any other way of communication. Now we planned further steps and want to share them with you.

eyeOS 1.6 will be continued as most stable eyeOS branch. Updates will be released every month.

eyeOS 1.7 will be our next production version. It is based on eyeOS 1.6, but will introduce many new features: It will be completely translatable and themable and you will be able to define system administrators and system maintainers. For a complete list please visit this page.

eyeOS 2.0 will be our next system, which will introduce a new toolkit, a new base design with a new concept of Web Desktop usage and many new features and base applications. Note that eyeOS 2.x will be compatible with eyeOS 1.x: Applications from eyeOS 1.x will also work with eyeOS 2.x! We will publish more information about eyeOS 2.0 soon.

The eyeOS Developers Community has been evolving since the first days at eyeOS. Nowadays, a developer that discovers eyeOS has a wide variety of resources to get introduced to the eyeOS applications development, communicate with other developers, publish ideas and bugs, etc.

Today, a new user asked for help in the Spanish forum about what should he/she do to start programming new applications for eyeOS, and Jose Carlos Norte answered with a small but great summary of almost everything available for new developers:

The eyeOS Developers Community Start-Page. The initial point for every developer, with a summary of all available resources. Available in many different languages (talk with Lars K. if you would like to translate the websites to your language!). Direct links to the eyeOS Developer Manual, the Getting Started guide…

The eyeOS Documentation Center. For those developers who have already read the Developer Manual and are already programming or starting to program eyeOS Applications. It’s really useful when you need to know which parameters should be passed to a widget, how to use a library or service…

The eyeOS Developers Mailing List, specially good when help is needed or when we’re stacked programming some application. Also useful for suggestions inside the eyeOS code, how to prepare new releases…

Finally, the Launchpad Resources. Mainly: Bugs and Blueprints. Useful to report and track open bugs that could be solved (some developers send patches to the mailing list with possible solutions or workarounds for open bugs), and to see or send new ideas about eyeOS and applications that could be developed.

As you can see, there is no reason for not starting today to program eyeOS Applications

Nutzt man die den normalen Weg zur Installation von Anwendungen unter eyeOS, so k??nnen dort nur Programme ausgew??hlt werden, welche von eyeOS Soft selbst freigegeben wurden. Anwendungen, welche bei eyeOS-Apps.org zu finden sind, m??ssen bislang zun??chst runter und dann auf den eyeOS Server hochgeladen werden.

Mit h3oEyeAppInstaller erhalten “root” User nun die M??glichkeit auch auf das eyeOS-Apps.org Verzeichnis zuzugreifen und die dort vorhandenen Anwendungen bequem zu installieren. Man sollte jedoch vorsichtig sein, bevor man willk??rlich alle Anwendungen installiert, da manche nur f??r alte Versionen von eyeOS sind und nicht mehr aktualisiert werden.

Nachdem nun 10 Anwendungen f??r eyeOS von h3o ver??ffentlicht wurden, wird es Zeit etwas Bestandspflege zu betreiben. Daher wird der es noch eine weitere Anwendung im Julie geben, bevor im August dann ??nderungen an den bestehenden Anwendungen vorgenommen werden. Bisherige Anwender von h3oApps sind herzlichst eingeladen ihren Beitrag in Form von Anregungen entweder hier im Blog oder im Forum zu leisten.

Innerhalb der n??chsten Tage wird es eine Serie von Postings hier im Blog geben, die eine Roadmap f??r jede h3oApp beinhalten werden.

Zum Schluss: Die eine Anwendung, die noch im Julie kommen wird, k??nnte sich um das Thema FaceBook drehen.

The third mantainance release for eyeOS 1.6 has been released, and can be downloaded from the eyeOS Downloads Page. For those users using the eyeOS Free Server, it’s already running the new version, so just log in!

This new version includes full compatibility with Firefox 3.0 and many minor bug fixes in services, libraries and applications. It does not include any security fix, but it’s recommended to all eyeOS system administrators.

Once again, we must thank the eyeOS Development Community, which is getting involucrated into every new eyeOS release, mainly through the eyeOS Development Mailing List, which is becoming more active every day.

To see the full change log, please continue reading.

Changes since 1.6.0.2:

[Add] Kernel aliases eyeCalendar library now has an alias.
[Change] eyeManageApps eyeManageApps now shows the group's icon along with its name.
[Fix] eyeCalendar   Corrected bug that permitted the creation of events with an ending time previous to its start time.
[Fix] eyeContacts   Fixed bug that showed a confirmation dialog when trying to delete a contact without selecting one.
[Fix] eyeSessions   Fixed duration of the cookie set due to a problem with its handling in PHP.
[Fix] miniActions   Fixed bug that made it open two instances of the application.
[Fix] Tab widget    The Tab widget now uses a positive default width and height values.
[Fix] eyeWidgets    Fix on the unserialization of a widget.
[Fix] eyeSessions   Fixed bug that can take place when a long request is made.
[Fix] mmap+Kernel   Now mmap uses the function json_encode to pass an array to the JavaScript code. This change allows to pass an array correctly under Firefox 3.
[Fix] eyeX          Long requests made to the server work perfect under Firefox 3.
[Fix] eyeDesk       Fixed the duplicated contextual menus under Firefox 3.
[Fix] eyeManageApps eyeManageApps now lists the groups and applications icon's.
[Fix] eyeManageApps Improved presentation under IE6.
[Fix] mmap   Fixed problem in service_mmap_array2jsArg() with null-like values

Gerade wenn man mit mehreren Personen auf einem eyeOS Server zusammen arbeiten möchte, fehlt es bislang an einer Wiki Anwendung. h3oWiki schliesst diese Lücke. Es handelt sich hierbei um ein Wiki, welches vollständig ohne Datenbank auskommt. Sobald das Programm auf dem Server installiert ist, haben die Anwender Zugriff und können Seiten veröffentlichen - ideal zum Sammeln von Gedanken.

Das Herz bildet WiKiss eine PHP Wiki Engine.

Sollte Bedarf darin bestehen, die Wiki Seiten auch öffentlich zur Verfügung zu stellen, kann per Kommentar im Blog ein Patch angefordert werden, welcher genau dies ermöglicht.

To see eyeOS widely used by scientists all around the world, a group of eyeOS users and developers, leaded by Alexandre Mejat, has initiated the eyeLIMS project. eyeLIMS is a community-driven project which aims at providing a Free Open Source Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) powered by eyeOS.

The eyeLIMS community will develop new eyeOS applications or port to eyeOS existing free open source applications specifically dedicated to molecular and cellular biology.

The eyeLIMS Software Suite will include a set of eyeOS applications dedicated to common activities in research laboratories such as managing samples or reagents (eyeStorage), managing bibliographic references (eyeBiblio) or manipulating data (eyeJmol).

The whole project is Free and Open Source and will be released under GNU Affero GPL v.3 license (the same as eyeOS). If you would like to collaborate with the project or you are interested in following its development, you can check the project’s homepage and its discussion board.

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.

After the presentation of the new Documentation Centre , which is already being used by lots of eyeOS Developers every day, we are announcing today another key part in every project which wants to involucrate new developers: The eyeOS Developer Manual [312kb, PDF, 37 pages].

This manual is a guide for every programmer who wants to introduce himself to the eyeOS project. Note that PHP programming skills are very recommended to fully understand the manual and the applications creation procedure on eyeOS.

The manual can also be consulted online from the documentation centre.

Note that this is an early release of the manual, which does include the basics to develop eyeOS applications. New version with corrections and new chapters will be published (probably on April 2008).

We are really proud to explain that Softpedia, the great software downloads website, has added a new “eyeOS” section under the Internet software category.

The new eyeOS category (which shows almost all the apps in the eyeOS Applications Community) will make possible to lots of Softpedia users to discover eyeOS as a new way to work, from everywhere with the same apps and games.

This is a very important step in eyeOS, since both the community and the core team are working together to create a platform where thousands of apps can live on, and the support of one of the biggest downloads website, which does provide specially downloads for the traditional Operating Systems, shows that we’re going the right way (but there’s still a long road to go!).

The next step will be to place a big round button called eyeOS on the top of the software sites, with Windows, MacOS, Linux…. But for that, we need 10 or 15.000 apps ;-).

Thanks, Softpedia!

Any Operating System can be considered good and used when the developers are interested in developing apps for it. For this to happen, developers must see benefits of using such a new platform to learn and code.

eyeOS is a very strong platform to develop rich Web Applications from scratch, with or without a desktop as background to work: the developer can forget HTML, JavaScript, AJAX… and user management, base security and lots of other things, by letting eyeOS take care of all this and center the efforts to create the application itself, like if it was a desktop one.

For this reason, the whole eyeOS Team is working hard on provide every developer the needed tools to discover the power of the eyeOS core and Toolkit and to start programming on it, with a strong development community behind.

The first step (and it’s just the “Part I” of a serie) is the new eyeOS Documentation Centre , a new platforw which does provide reference and documentation for every system part: Widgets, Services, Libraries and Kernel.

The new Documentation Centre (which can be accessed from doc.eyeos.org) has been created using eyeOS. The Documentation Centre itself is formed by eyeOS Applications, after removing the Desktop layer. Of course, you can download its source (released as Open Source) and create your Documentation Centre with it. You will find download links and information on the Centre’s homepage.

Due to some claims in the eyeOS Forums, we have decided to release a RC before the final eyeOS 1.5: The new version will be codenamed 1.5 (instead of 1.3) due to the big improvements in functionalities it will have. We want this release to be the most stable ever, and for that, we want to be sure that it does not have important bugs.

eyeOS 1.5 includes three new big applications: eyePresentation, to watch Microsoft Powerpoints and OpenOffice Presentations with eyeOS, eyeSheets, to see and edit Microsoft and OpenOffice sheets (between other formats) and eyeMessages, an app to send and receive internal messages with the possibility to attach files to the messages. Sending files between eyeOS users has not been easier never before!.

Note that both documents and spreadsheets will open with eyeVisor first, which ensure a great compatibility and does not edit the file at all. As you will see, eyeViewer has an awesome good compatibility with Sheets and documents, preserving all the formats and styles. While editing Excel/OpenOffice Sheets is still experimental, it will be included in the new release, so feedback on the Sheets editor opening excel/ooosheets with formulas will be greatly appreciated.

The new version also includes the brand new eyeCalendar and eyeContacts, which are now a complete Calendar and Agenda, with multiple calendars/colors and a great importing and exporting tool from vCard (that can import thousands of contacts at same time).

We have prepared an Online server where everybody can test and play with the new release. We recommend everybody to test the new eyeOS from the Online server, since it does have the OpenOffice connector installed (complete instructions to install it in any server will be given the day of the release). It’s an open server, so everybody can register, but it will be deleted after the release.

To test the new release, please go to rctests.eyeos.org .

You can download the eyeOS RC1 from here (Note that it’s a self installed package, and does not provide the eyeOS security settings created by the installer, so please do not use it under production environments. User: root - Password: root) .

We have also created a new forum named Release Candidates Bug Reports to center in one single place all the discussion about found bugs. Please, use it for posting new bugs and discussing existent ones. It’s the best moment to do it!

Some notes on this release:

• This release includes the right click actions and makes intensive use of it. All feedback on this will be appreciated.
• eyeFiles does not show the final boxes for the release (you can now right click on files to show specific actions or on blank space on eyeFiles to show global actions). The final release will have both Tree and Actions boxes.
• If you use the packed version, remember to give sufficient permissions to all the files for the webserver’s user to be able to read and write to the whole system.
• Feedback on opening and using office files (specially OpenOffice and MSOffice ones) will be really appreciated.
• eyeSheets save button is not supposed to work in this RC.

PS: As you may supose, the big surprise around eyeOS will be announced (or presented ) with the final release.

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